Travel Blog

Sue:

If you're ever a tourist in Skagway, please don't do as these folks:

This ain't Disneyland. But enough about work. Let's talk about my new slippers:

They're like sleeping bags for my feet. Ahhhhhhhhhh. They're perfect for when I'm sitting outside on my porch with my bubble gun that my sister Gina sent me:

So we don't even have to pucker anymore. Nice.

Not much has been going on lately. I've become a carving widow. All Phil does in his spare time is carve. Our boss just gave him a walrus jawbone to try his hand at, so that got Phil all excited.

And I'm still getting hummingbird visitors, but thought you might be a little bored with those pics, so here's a new feathered visitor to our humble RV:

Stellar Blue Jay? I don't know my birds, but that was Sherry's guess from my description. Let me know if I'm wrong.

Sue:

Something very cool happened at work yesterday. I was doing something, probably not working or helping anyone, but something, and I turn around and look right into a familiar face...a very good friend of mine from my AccuWeather days...Jason Guthrie! I was so happy and surprised. I asked if he emailed me to tell me he was coming (because I never check my email) and he said nope, he wanted to surprise me. Well, he did, and it was great. His visit made my day. So come on ya'll, visit us in Skagway. I hear you can get some great deals on cruises right now.

Sue:

We were walking home from work today and got a text message from Sherry telling us momma bear and her cubs were by the Dyea crossroads. We were going to be right there in a few minutes, so we called Sherry to get more details. She was driving around to charge her car battery, so she came and got us and we drove up the Dyea road to see if we could find the bears. I snapped this one through the car windshield:

Yesterday was the Spring Stroll in Skagway. This annual event is put on by the Chamber of Commerce to encourage all the seasonal employees to go see what is in other stores around town. The object is to go get a card stamped at all the participating merchants. Along the way you sign up for drawings at many stores to win small door prizes. This was my first year doing it because Sue and I have always had to work. She still had to work, so I set off on the adventure with our old boss Sherry and our friend Stacey.

Making the rounds in Skagway with Sherry and Stacey is like trying to go to the mall with the Obama kids. Everyone knows them. So we spent a lot of time chit chatting with other locals and catching up on town news. I also got to scope out what stuff was selling at other stores. After three years I still think ours has the best selection. Of course after setting it up this year I might be bias.

We also stopped by a book signing for a local celebrity Dawson Dolly, the original “madam” at the Red Onion Saloon. “Hoots and Toots on Dolly’s Parlor Car” gives some fun excerpts from the life and times of Dawson Dolly (aka Cindy Godbey) and is worth a quick read if you are interested in modern life in the Yukon. To see more about Dawson Dolly check out her site here.

Today is the first day Sue and I have had off together in two weeks, so we are going out to enjoy the sun that has graced us with an appearance.

Happy Mother's Day to all our Moms - Sis Baker, Pat Payne, Elissa Powell-Payne and Paula Bittner. We love you!

Sue:

They love me...they really love me!

Sue:

So we left our tour at the Golden North Hotel.

This hotel was built in 1898, but was only two stories back then. In 1908, after they moved it from its original location down to 3rd Avenue (by horse - it's said that the reason the hotel is set back farther than the other buildings is because the horse up and died, so they left it as it was), they added a third story and the golden dome.

In 1923, President Harding came to Skagway and stayed in the hotel. This is the bed he slept in:

He died a few weeks after his trip to Skagway, and it's rumored that his death was a result of some bad Chinese food he'd eaten here. But, like I said, that's just a rumor. We don't have Chinese food here in Skagway.

Now for the haunted part. Our boss, who owns the hotel, told us of many strange occurences in the hotel; some so disturbing that staff up and quit on them. Family members have also had strange things happen to them when they stayed overnight at the hotel. The most known story is the ghost of room 24, named Mary. The story is that back in 1898, Mary was a young woman waiting for her fiance to return from the gold fields. She stayed at the Golden North Hotel in room 24. While she was waiting, she contracted TB and died, in her wedding dress. Folks have said they have seen a figure dressed in white in the hotel. Here's Mary's room:

Nancy Corrington told us there was another, less friendly, ghost in the hotel that was actually exorcised by a priest. And now we have some fellow interested in coming to the hotel to try to capture the ghosts on film. We asked if they were going to let that guy come and do it, and they think they will, so Phil and I volunteered to stay in the hotel with him to keep an eye on things. How cool would that be?

I'll finish the tour with a view from one of the windows in the hotel. Maybe the same window Mary watched for her love to come back to her.

Sue:

Since it's our third summer in Skagway, Phil and I decided to take an official tour today. Well, official in that we had an actual tour guide leading the way. Our guide was Pete Luchetti, who is the husband of Mickie, our Operations Manager. Pete's an artist, photographer and fellow Penn Stater. He and Mickie also have a kid with the longest name ever - Leonardo Giovanni Spartacus Luchetti. (But that's not the oddest name for a kid is Skagway...we overheard a parent calling their toddler Linen in the hardware store the other day). But anyway, Pete is the guy with the orange ball cap:

We started the tour way down on 1st Avenue, down by the docks, where Pete filled us in on the geography of Skagway that makes it a one-of-a-kind spot. I didn't have a notebook with me, so I can't remember exactly what he said, but I'm sure you can look up Skagway geography online if that's what floats your kayak. But to name just a few cool features, you have deep (1500 feet right off the dock) ocean water on one side, a large freshwater river (the Yukon) not 30 miles away, glaciers, fijords, mountains, etc. all around. It's really just extraordinary, geographically speaking.

Right across from where we're standing in the picture above, you find the old train depot from the early 1900s. The train tracks used to run right down the middle of Broadway (the road we're standing nearby), so the location of this building really made sense back then.

This building was slated for demolition in the 1960s or thereabouts, but the National Park Service purchased it for one dollar and renovated it. It is now the NPS Visitor's Center, where you can go and learn all about the Gold Rush of 1898.

We turned left onto 2nd Avenue to go see Jefferson "Soapy" Smith's Parlor:

This is his actual parlor from 1898, but it was moved from its original location somewhere around 5th Avenue. This building, as you can probably tell, has not been renovated recently and is not open to the public. But there are some talk about its future in the tourism trade. A fellow named Martin Itjen (who owned the Skagway Streetcars and who invited Mae West to "come up and see him sometime...and she did!) owned this building back in the 1920s or so, and was apparently a mechanical genius who liked to build robots. Pete says he built an animated Soapy, who, when you came through the door of the parlor, turned around and shot you. Supposedly, that's inside this building right now! So there's plans to maybe get something going with that. We told Mickie to let us know when that happens. That may just warrant another trip up to Skagway.

When you turn around from the parlor, you see the Red Onion Saloon, the most exclusive bordello in Skagway back in 1898. It's also not in its original location, and when they moved it (around 1908) from one part of town to where it is now (to be closer to the railway), they couldn't turn it around in the road, so they just put it in backwards and built a new front to it. So it's a backwards bordello. Hmmmmm.

After the Red Onion, we moseyed over to this structure:

These buildings used to be part of the military barracks that were here before they moved over to Haines. So new owners (or squatters) chopped them up and moved them down to 3rd Avenue and put false fronts on them and opened for business. Today there are shops in the front, and I think people live back where we are in this picture.

Turning to our right, we found Kirmse's Curious:

Kirmse was a jeweler who brought his own gold with him to the Klondike. He barged in cantelopes and sold them to scurvey-ridden, but newly wealthy, stampeders for $50 a lope (he got $25 for the rotten ones). We were told to keep in mind this was at a time when a fancy meal in San Francisco ran you about a quarter, so that was a good move on Kirmse's part, wouldn't you say? He used his new wealth to open up shop in Skagway. Pete told us he was actually a very skilled artisan and jeweler, but you won't find any of his award-winning work because he favored a symbol in his art that unfortunately was adopted by the Nazi party in the 1940s.

Our last stop was William Moore's log cabin:

In June of 1887, Skookum Jim, a Tlingit packer from Dyea and Tagish (on a side note, I met a descendant of Jim's on Monday when she came into the Ivory shop), led Capt. William Moore, a member of Canada's Ogilvie survey party, to Skagway. In October, William comes back with his son, Ben, and they staked their claim to 160 acres (basically, all of Skagway) and call it Mooresville. Moore had the foresight to know that there was gold in them thar hills, and he knew that Skagway would be an intregal part when gold was discovered nearby. He had to wait several years, but he was right. Unfortunately, when all the folks swarmed into Skagway, they made their own laws, ignored Moore's claim, and sold his land to others. Eventually Moore settled with the town and got a buttload of money.

And that was where Pete said goodbye, and Mickie took us to the Golden North Hotel for a tour with the owner, and my boss, Nancy Corrington. I think I'll continue with that tomorrow.

Sue:

Summer has hit the Skag. I've been sweaty and cranky this past week. I didn't come to Alaska for highs in upper 70s. The newbies are getting spoiled. I hope they don't fall into a deep depression when the rains come. But anyway, Phil and I enjoyed the balminess today, and I snapped this picture of Phil by the seashore (he was not collecting shells, if you were wondering):

In other news, I had this whole blog written last night about all I've been learning about hummingbirds. It was very compelling and riveting, but it didn't save because I took too long writing it, and all was lost. And I got peeved and turned off the computer for the night. I'm never going to be able to recreate that magical post, but I do have some pictures of hummingbirds who visited us today. This hummingbird feeder is actually my neighbors. I have two of them near my RV, but the hummingbird took one sniff of my home-made sugar water and flew over to Nick's. I was feeling very dejected that my concoction was dismissed, until I noticed my feeder doesn't have the yellow flower centers that Nick's has. Maybe the hummies need that little yellow center. And that would explain why my sugar water was spilling out all over the place this morning while I was hanging the feeder up. Live and learn. Hopefully once I fix my feeder, my RV will be the hummingbird haven of Skagway.