In which we take a helicopter ride, and not only survive but actually enjoy the experience.  Ok, Wayne wasn’t too worried, but I was.

I slept a bit better, but still not great. For some reason we both woke up at 4:40 and really never got back to sleep. Wayne got up about 5:00, made coffee and sat out on the balcony watching the scenery go by. I stayed in bed as long as I could stand, hoping to catch up on rest if not sleep.

Even though we didn’t have to meet up with our tour until 10:35, we still opted for the buffet. It’s just easier all around, and for breakfast the food is acceptable. Once again, on our way out of the ship my brand new cabin card refused to swipe.  WTF?

Today was the helicopter/dog sledding day, the most extravagant of all the excursions we’d booked. I was a bit nervous about the helicopter ride, but really looking forward to playing with sled dog puppies. :) We knew that this was the most cancelled excursion of the whole trip, so we weren’t too surprised to be told that our morning flight had been cancelled due to poor visibility on the glacier, and that we were being rescheduled to 2:15 pm.

We took a local SMART shuttle into town, and transferred to another that took us to Jewell Gardens and Glassblowing. The same bus goes to the Klondike gold panning place and a few other tourist traps. The gardens were actually quite nice, but the $12-ish charge to get in seemed excessive to me, particularly when they’re just planting and most of the garden seems quite unfinished. You sort of get the feeling that some entrepreneur got the bright idea of charging stupid tourists to view his wife’s (admittedly quite large) kitchen garden, and put in a G-scale model railroad to make it seem less like a personal garden.

They have two glassblowing sheds and some really beautiful stuff for sale (though outrageously priced). We watched both blowers do their presentations and they did a good job, but the prominent tip jars were tacky IMHO. We’d already paid way too much to be there.

We took the shuttle back to Broadway, the main drag, and started the hunt for an appropriate Juli-pen (which sadly failed this time).

We also had lunch at a place called StarFire, which was very interesting. A very limited menu of very good Thai food. Every employee I could see was white, but most of their customers were Asian. A real twist on what we are used to seeing.

Eventually we ran out of stuff to do, so we went back to find out if the helicopter trips had started going out again. It turned out she had given us the wrong time – the dogsledding trip was supposed to leave at 1:45. But it didn’t matter, as the afternoon trips were cancelled too. :( The only thing they could offer us at that point was a Glacier Discovery tour – a helicopter ride that lands on a glacier so you can get out and walk around. Not at all the same thing, but Wayne really wanted to do it so we said yes. Figures, I ended up with the helicopter ride and no puppies! :)

I had brought my pocket camera instead of my good one thinking we’d be dog sledding and I wouldn’t want the nice one bouncing around. But with the plan change, I wanted the better camera. So I went back to the boat and to the cabin to swap cameras. With an unscheduled detour to Guest Services, because my card wouldn’t open the cabin door.

When I got back out to the tour waiting area we still had about half an hour, so I made Wayne do a quick walk back into town so I could take a few pictures. He wasn’t real happy about this; he was worried we would get back too late. But we made it with six minutes to spare!

Back at the Temsco headquarters (the folks with the helicopters), we had to watch a very silly safety film (I’m pretty sure that in an actual emergency, no-one would remember most of it well enough to use it) and put on life jackets and “overboots” with plastic spiky bottoms, which went on over our street shoes. Then they loaded us into the helicopter in a specific order, designed to balance the weight distribution, and I didn’t get to sit next to Wayne! He was in the front seat with the pilot, and I sat directly behind the pilot. Then there was another couple in the back seat with me.

Sitting in the helicopter waiting to take off seemed like it went on forever. Helicopters make me nervous; they crash way more often than airplanes, even small ones, and when something goes wrong they drop like a rock with very little opportunity for a safe crash landing. So I was nervous to begin with, and not being able to hold Wayne’s hand while waiting just made it worse. But finally we took off, and it felt a lot more stable than I expected. There was some bouncing around and drifting with the wind, but for the most part we floated along right where we were supposed to be.

We flew along the edge of a river and then turned up a canyon, over a few ridges, and then landed on the glacier. We all got out and walked around with walking sticks and our spiky overboots. I had expected it to look like a big snow field but it was actually a big ice field, with patches of incredible blue.

Yes, we actually landed and walked around on that!

After about 45 minutes we got back in the helicopters and flew back. Coming in for a landing was awesome, a hard left turn while dropping fast. It sounds scary but it wasn’t, just exhilarating.

We got back on the boat and napped for about an hour. I was feeling reasonably good, but my ears were *seriously* plugged up. They had popped properly on our way up, but not on our way back. I didn’t realize how bad it was until we sat down for dinner and I bit into a piece of crusty bread; it was like eating (and talking) with earplugs in.

Dinner this night was at Le Bistro, a French restaurant. It was excellent – still a bit salty, as everything on the ship seems to be, but still quite good.

The entertainment was “Shout! The Mod Musical”, which featured all the girls from “Band on the Run” from a couple of nights ago, singing sixties songs. They did a pretty good jobs of making fun of young women’s magazines by featuring pieces from the (probably fictitious) “Shout!” magazine, which told of the latest trends and was generally pretty ridiculous. I enjoyed it;  Wayne thought “Band on the Run” was better.