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Old 24 Feb 20, 07:56 PM  
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Scruffette
Very Serious Dibber
 
Join Date: May 12
O Can-aska - Day 7 - Skagway

O Can-aska - Day 7

Index

Thursday 5th September 2019 - Skagway

Today would be our first port of call this cruise – Skagway.

The day started with breakfast in Cabanas, enjoying the view of Skagway.





Of course Ollie had noodles for breakfast –



We disembarked the ship straight after breakfast, via a quick stop in the Palo toilets – always less busy than the Cabanas toilets and a lot fancier. For example, where else would they make the hand towels look like a peacock? Worth climbing the one flight of stairs for!









This morning we would be taking a journey on the White Pass scenic Railway, taking you to the summit of white pass.

Disney offers this excursion, where the train will pick you up from the cruise dock. However, we booked directly with the railway, which meant we boarded the train at the station in town. This was a 10 minute walk and saved us about $20 each, so well worth it.

We did check availability of the Skagway Street Car Tour, who had a representative at the dock. We tried to book in advance but were advised to check on the day, as the cruise lines gets priority booking. There was availability for that day, but it clashed with our train journey, which was a shame.

Walking into Skagway was lovely. The town looked so quaint and almost from the past – add some background music and I could have believed I was in a theme park.





And the ship looked beautiful against the back drop –





Our tour was departing at 9am – we got there nice and early to make sure we got good seats.









Luckily, our carriage was less than half full, which meant we had excellent views. One family spent almost the whole tour asleep! I think I woke them up at one point when I accidentally slammed the train door shut.



We spent a large portion of the journey on the viewing platforms outside between carriages. No one else in our carriage wanted to spend time out there, so we spend a lot of time outside. This afforded us some amazing views, particularly when we were very high up. I’m normally a bit of a wimp, so was quite proud of myself how chilled I was outside!





There was narration all the way up, but being outside we did miss a chunk of this.

The views were beautiful and this was my favourite excursion of the holiday. We were lucky it was a really beautiful day which meant we could appreciate the stunning views – I imagine on a grey and drizzly day it wouldn’t have been the same.

I took hundreds of photos during the trip, but I’ll just share a selection!

























Fortunately we weren’t going over this bridge -






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After our journey, the train was doing a stop off at the dock, so we thought we’d get off here, have some lunch, and then go back into town to explore afterwards.



We fancied lunch in the main dining room, it was really quiet in here which made for a chilled experience.

Our server, Nica, was lovely. We saw her a few more times during the cruise and she always made an effort to chat with us. We made sure to put her name on our comment card at the end of the cruise.

To start, we had the roasted red pepper arancini – with arriabbata sauce, parmiagana-reggiano and fried Italian parsley



You can’t really go wrong with arancini.

We also shared the Herb roasted chicken salad – marinated roasted chicken with baby spinach, poached pears, spicy pecans, brie and shallot-thyme vinaigrette



It’s not often I rave about a salad, but this was excellent. I think because it was made up of lots of non-typical salad ingredients – I love brie and the pears were a nice touch. In fact, all the salads we had for lunches in the main dining room were really good.

For mains, I had the ricotta gnocchi Quattro stagioni – gnocchi tossed in a light cream sauce with grilled artichokes, buffalo mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and olives



I’ve only ever had gnocchi a handful of times and enjoyed this. Although I did pick out the olives!

Ollie had the Fettucine pasta – with homemade meatballs in a rich Rome tomato sauce with basil and parmiagano-regiiano shavings



Not his most memorable dish of the trip, but still nice.

We must have been pretty hungry today as we also decided to get a burger on the side (making up for the poor effort on lunch yesterday)! The classic – 1/2lb angus beef served on a toasted sourdough bun with American Cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes and red onions served with French fries.



I was really impressed with this burger. It seemed a much better quality burger than those available on the pool deck (although I do like these too) and was really delicious.
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