Juneau's brightly lit dark side
2005-08-26 16:35:03.357295+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments
Let's get the other negative from the Alaska trip out of the way so I can go back to the good stuff: Juneau. We got into town on Friday evening and wandered down to the wharf to find something to eat. Total culture shock. We ended up in a place called "The Hangar", although it appears not to be a chain it totally had that "mall restaurant bar food" feel, and I couldn't tell if it was the band or the sound system, but from where we were sitting the folks behind the mic... well... it was food, late enough that we were grateful their kitchen was open, the food was actually good (once the waitress got my order right), and we carried on.
After the helicopter trip, we wandered down again, this time when more stuff was open. I had no idea. Our friend Jeanne had said "oh, every town in Alaska has a jewelry store", and we... well... in Petersburg there were two galleries, and I think both of them had a jewelry counter, so we'd thought we'd seen the jewelry store.
We knew that the cruise lines own many (if not most) of the tourist shops in the towns with deep water ports for the cruise ships, but the feeling that I was stuck in some gross parody of Pier 39 was overwhelming. As we wandered from T-shirt and trinket shop to overpriced mall-style jewelry store I eventually said that my life was too short and too precious to spend too much more time there.
Since petronius took my "bunch of midwesterners" bait [grin], I figured I had to include this telling bit of linguistics; you can figure out a lot about a place's intended customers by how they advertise.
The funny thing was that none of the people we talked to in Juneau who were on cruises seemed to be enjoying them. They all said "it's not a great way to see Alaska, but I'm with family, so..." or something similar.
Sunday we woke up late, kinda bummed out, but we'd heard about Glacier Gardens, so we hopped on a bus and had a great day. Glacier Gardens started out as the growing gardens of a guy with a landscaping business, and is now a showcase for his work, along with 600 or so vertical feet of more native vegetation. For $20 each you get a guided tour, and the tour guides are fairly knowledgeable, so we learned a bunch about local flora. The photo on the left there is the stemp of Devil's Club, a plant we heard a lot about but didn't see until here. Note how nasty that stem looks, and there are spines on the leaves, too. The first image below is Devil's Club with berries, a little further back for identification.
The rest of the place is a showcase for the landscaping business, and a venue for evening events; everyone we talked to for directions and bus tips said "I haven't been there, but I hear weddings there are beautiful". And normally we're not much on treacly wedding stuff, but the flowers and gardens were beautiful, and the ability to pick some knowledgeable brains about native plants was very fun.
One final note: We stayed at the Driftwood Lodge, with a view looking out over the Governor's mansion. The place was decent, inexpensive, as advertised had a kitchenette, and the neighboring restauralt, "The Fiddlehead", was decent enough that we ate there several times. It also surprised us because one of thir morning options was sautéed brown rice and veggies.
Still managed to get our orders wrong, a common issue we had in restaurants in Juneau, but the staff was friendly and the food tasty.