Our tour today started a little later than the others. We had to meet at 1:45 pm on the gangway to head over to the Great Alaskan Lumberjack show. Again, on paper this reads like something I wouldn’t do if you paid me – but the experience itself was a blast. The show features two teams of lumberjacks competing against each other. The audience is divided into two ‘cheering’ sections and is encouraged to cheer for their team and heckle the other. The heckling part was especially fun for me. The lumberjacks do all sorts of lumberjack things – like chopping wood, climbing polls and basically looking all ‘lumberjacky’. After each event, the winning team will hand out a wood chip to an audience member as a souvenir, which is a really nice touch that the kids in our group seemed to enjoy.
Our next stop on the tour was to be today’s “try not to die” experience. We were going to walk through the Alaskan rainforest to look for black bears. We’re told to make sure we have no food of any kind on us, as bears can smell it. We’re told not to run if we see a bear because their vision is based on movement. We’re told not to talk or make noise. At this point I’m asking myself “then WHY THE HELL ARE WE DOING THIS”. So, as our guide takes us through the rainforest, explaining various things to us – I look up ahead and see something terrifying. No, not a bear – ANOTHER SUSPENSION BRIDGE. Apparently we haven’t sent the blueprints to Alaska for building a normal bridge so they just keep making these rickety-ass suspension bridges. There wasn’t one suspension bridge either, there was like 90 (okay, it was more like 4).
From there we were off to George Inlet Lodge for a crab dinner. Now, not eating seafood, this was not appealing to me, but I was given the option for chicken. One could be forgiven for thinking that the chicken dinner at a crab house would suck, but you’d be wrong. It was delicious!! And the portion was MASSIVE. But, if you like crab – apparently, this is the place to come. What was served was fresh Dungeness crabs and the folks eating it were saying things like ‘best I’ve ever had’ or ‘I normally don’t like Dungeness crab, but this is amazing’.
Part of the experience here is that they measure the height of the pile of crab shells you place in a bowl after eating them. So at various points throughout the meal, this young girl with a ruler runs around the restaurant yelling things like “4 inches”, “6 inches”, “8 inches”. I’m just going to stop there and let you all ponder why I was covering my face to keep from screaming in laughter. Go ahead…I’ll wait.
At the end of the meal the table with the ‘most inches’ has to get up and do a dance. This is also what happens in gay bars, but on an entirely different level. Behold – the Crab Dance!!
This wasn’t an okay meal – it was an awesome meal and a great way to cap off our last full day of the ABD portion of our trip.
Next – our last day at sea and some final thoughts about our cruise
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