Ketchican

Ketchican holds the title of “America’s Rainiest City” by virtue of receiving more than a hundred inches of rainfall per year. According to natives, only one in five days in sunny.

Our uncanny weather luck continued, then, during our visit to Ketchican today. From the moment we arrived, the sun shone, the air cleared, and the sky became an expanse of pure and cloudless blue.

As you’d expect with any port accepting cruise ships, the area closest to the docks is saturated with trinket shops and jewelry stores. There are, in fact, fifty-one jewelry stores in Ketchican; all told, they pull more than one million dollars a day from the endless stream of cruise ship passengers.

Peel back the shiny veneer, and you’ll find the real Ketchican — a tidy little island without a single square foot of natural flatland. (Home and building sites have to be blasted into the steep mountainsides — a fact that drives real estate prices sky high.) Outside of downtown, there’s no community water, either, so homes are built with a septic tank beneath the foundation line … and a rain water collection barrel above the roof.

According to the natives, the best local burgers come from Burger Queen — a rickety stand several blocks away from the streets haunted by tourists.(Burger King has tried to come to Ketchican three times; unable to compete with the city’s one McDonald’s, they’ve gone out of business every time.) We didn’t snag any sandwiches, but we did grab a sackful of hand-thrown chocolates from Ketchicandy, a locally-owned chocolate shop that sculpts pure Belgian goodness into custom-made macadamia clusters and “dark crispy bark.”

The Bight Totem Park is about ten minutes away, and well worth a visit, even if you just step inside the reproduction clan house and hear a guide reveal the stories associated with any of the dozens of totem poles scattered across the property.

Back on board the ship, we head up to the Crow’s Nest, pick out a recliner or two, and get down to our biggest chore of the day: downing two delicious Cosmo Cubanas and a tray of hot snacks.

Tomorrow: all day at sea, then Vancouver on Friday morning … and, after a flight home, our first cruise vacation will come to an end.

In the past, we’ve been very “anti-cruising,” preferring to make arrangements and set schedules ourselves. Both of us, though, have to admit that this is probably our most relaxing trip ever (my blood pressure’s reached a record low this week), and Clyde, bless him, is already browsing our Holland America catalog with an eye toward future adventures. (The 121-day “around the world” cruise sounds more and more appealing!)