Skagway

sorry this is posting so late - guess whom got Norovirus!  simply unbelievable!  and i have gotten to spend the past 33 hours vomiting up everything I have ever eaten!

Skagway is an interesting town, only about 20 blocks in size and only 750 people live there!  One saloon. one cafe, a museum and a tourist train!  So imagine the fun when three cruiseliners are in port with 5,5000 passengers each!

Now there are several options for the train: short rides, long rides - both being diesel electric locomotives and a steam train.  Of course, I took the stearmer!

Communications are poor in the area, so train problems get to be discovered by the next train.  In our case, the four trains before us all got trapped by ice on the rails - and the lone steam locomotive had no problems at all!  But, we had to sand the rails for the four others so they could get back to Skagway!  There were some mighty unhappy passengers!

It was an awesome trip!  With only one problem when the train lurched, I was impaled on a 120 year old seat frame, which then ripped my brand new jeans a new one!  a 13 inch hole is just a little hard to hide!

The engineer told me that there was a shop with jeans in town!  Well, their largest waist was 30 inches!  By royally pissing off the clerks they finally found me one pair of 38 waist jeans!  But, I was happy and they had a sale they would not have had otherwise.

Lots of tee shirts and tourist jewelry, same stores in all of the ports, same offerings.  Being the end of the cruising season, everything was up to 75% off!

And a word to the wise:
brown diamonds, the hot item, are made in South Carolina and not natural!
yes, the natural ones do exist but a tourist clip joint in Alaska is not going to have hundreds of them!
tanzanite is extremely rare in over 2 carat sizes and color is almost always a light blue.
that gorgeous 15 carat of royal purple people were laying out $20,000 for .... well, not so natural ...