Instead of reading guidebooks and working my feeble brain, I let ChatGPT do the planning for our shore time in the various ports that Norwegian Joy brought us to. I cut and pasted the itinerary, said that we preferred to just walk off the ship rather than get into some other form of transport, and that we wanted to be active. ChatGPT’s first idea for a 1:30-10 pm stop:
Option A: Mendenhall Glacier + Nugget Falls. This is the safest family bet: transit/taxi/shuttle to Mendenhall, walk Nugget Falls, then return to town. The Forest Service notes that trails such as Nugget Falls, East Glacier, Trail of Time, Moraine Ecology, and Dredge Lakes do not require a fee just to hike, though some visitor-center areas do.
Option B: Mount Roberts Tram + hike from the top. This is closer to your ideal: the tram is right by the cruise docks, and Travel Juneau describes Mount Roberts Trail as 2 miles/1.5 hours to the Mountain House, 4.5 miles/4 hours to the summit, with the option to ride the tram up and hike from there. For kids, I’d ride up, hike toward Father Brown’s Cross or farther only as conditions allow, then tram down.
A caution: I would not push Mount Roberts hard in fog/rain or near dusk with kids. There were fatal cruise-passenger hiking incidents in the mountains above Juneau in 2025, including hikers who apparently left the actual trail in wet/foggy conditions.
ChatGPT was helpful in clarifying that the Mendenhall Glacier can’t be reached on foot from downtown Juneau and that Ubers aren’t easy to obtain. I ended up manually refining the above to include (1) a rental car from the cruise pier area, (2) eliminating the Mount Roberts Tram, which was down for maintenance, and (3) adding the National Shrine of St. Thérèse (because we had the car).
Some photos as we approached Juneau for our 1:30 pm disembarkation, highlighting the absurd mismatch between the ship’s waterslides and pools and the 50-degree cloudy windy weather.
Approaching the town (note the two other ships already docked):
AVIS has apparently had some issues with previous renters…
We got a Chevy Bolt and suffered zero range anxiety because… Juneau isn’t connected to any road network. AVIS rents nothing but EVs in this location. No need to worry about charging either because they tell you up front that you’ll pay $25 extra to recharge.
Here’s the total:
Quite a few services in Alaska are about 2X the price you’d pay in the Lower 48, so $254 for half a day of car rental isn’t terrible. It would have cost more to book a bus tour for four people out to the glacier and we wouldn’t have had any flexiblity.
First stop, the Mendenhall Glacier. Cropped just right, it looks like an uncrowded wilderness, right?
In reality, the parking lot was overflowing and the trail to Nuggel Falls was about as crowded as a Manhattan sidewalk.
The trail to the falls has some nice rainforest:
The falls per se is where you see that Fred Meyer was having a sale on humans:
If you could tolerate more sitting in a boat, this might be the way to do it:
From the walk back:
On to National Shrine of St. Thérèse (Wikipedia), a 30-minute drive away. Due to a fresh breeze coming off the water, this was much colder than the area around the glacier.
Something you might not see in Massachusetts, “This Memorial is Deduciated to the Victims of Abortion”:
The stations of the cross are depicted:
Note how bundled up against the wind everyone is:
One of the kids had a wardrobe malfunction at the waterfall so we stopped at Fred Meyer and found this awesome shirt:
Prices at the one and only McDonald’s in Southeast Alaska weren’t terrible, but adding a Denali Mac to the cruise ship diet was a sandwich too far.
Back in downtown Juneau…. here’s Seward, the man who made us masters of this domain, looking none too happy about the purchase:
Nice doggie:
The gift shops included my dream Christmas tree and a trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag:
The gift shop that was celebrating our 2SLGBTQQIA+ brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters with the flag out front also displayed quite a few dead animals inside:
Totem poles are everywhere, despite the fact that it was really natives much farther south who were passionate about this art form.
The last photo:
How well did ChatGPT do? In fairness, I didn’t say “I found a rental car” and then ask it to update the plan. I think it was too conservative about how much can be comfortably packed into a 9-hour block.
You didn’t put it in your summary, but sending you to a place down for maintenance is my most common experience using gen-ai for trip planning. Lack of currency, with no sense of time, leaks into every plan. Like you I was recently in Seattle and asked for a day trip to visit “innovative aviation companies” and every one on the list had been out of business for six months.
AI: Mistrust then verify.
Fun to compare much less well healed Greenspun’s 1993 trip with 2026’s. All original & extemporaneous in those days instead of the recycled training data of modern reality. A lot more glaciers in those days. Sadly, all the photocd files have been lost to bit rot.
Thanks, lion, for the kind words and for reading my 1993 book!
I’m confused by your use of the term “well healed” (you meant “well-heeled”?). I would personally love to be well healed at my age, but I can’t remember ever going to a doctor and getting an actual cure (i.e., being “healed”). What’s truly odd is that people then accept on faith that these failed healers can turn a man into a woman or vice versa.
If you did mean “well-heeled” and you still live in the San Francisco Bay Area, wouldn’t that be someone who made $250 million by age 25 in the AI Klondike? (Here in Palm Beach County perhaps it could be $100 million by age 60.)
Whether a person has that $250 million or not, I don’t think that he/she/ze/they could be successful in doing what I did in 1993, i.e., meet and talk to people in various settings, e.g., waiting for coffee or wandering around a town. People in 2026 aren’t distractible by other humans because they’re already fully distracted by their smartphones. People in 2026 also often have DouchePods in their ears and wouldn’t even be able to hear another human trying to talk to them.
Immigration and population growth also make it difficult to interact with strangers. It is tougher to strike up a conversation if an environment is crowded and people are already trying to preserve some of their personal space (see NYC). It is tougher to strike up conversations when there is no shared language, as the U.S. no longer has (on our trip we heard English, Spanish, Mandarin (I think), Hindi (maybe), Arabic, and probably 10 more languages that I couldn’t identify).
Which PhotoCD files do you want? I have them all.
The Denali is just a 50% larger Big Mac? How do the McDonald’s logistics work for making a custom version for that one McDonald’s? Bigger bun, bigger burger?
Or is this just the standard Big Mac in the Southeastern US?