ChatGPT’s first cut at a day off the cruise ship in Skagway, Alaska (6:30 am-7 pm):
This is probably your most natural hiking day. Do Lower Dewey Lake in the morning; it’s a real forest/lake hike close to town and cruise piers, and multiple Alaska cruise hiking guides recommend it as one of the best port hikes in Skagway.
Then do the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park museum/historic district. The NPS says its Skagway historic-district walking tour is a 0.64-mile self-guided tour, and the visitor center/museum and restored Mascot Saloon are part of the park experience. This gives the boys context for the gold rush without sacrificing the active day.
Again, ChatGPT shied away from “overtouristing” by giving us a lightweight schedule. Pressed, it also recommended riding the White Pass railroad, which, as it happens, was a pioneer in containerization.
We ended up not doing the Lower Dewey Lake hike because the only time available for the railroad was mid-day, it took us a while to get organized in the morning, and the train ride took longer than expected due to a locomotive failure.
Walking towards downtown from the cruise pier:
Crossing the railroad tracks:
I remembered the town as sleepy when I visited in 1993. Here’s a photo from the absolute peak of the tourist season in 1993, July 25:
For comparison, May 2026 (well before peak tourism; looks like the weather improved, at least, thanks to Climate Change!):
Quite a few of the sidewalks were covered to Times Square densities:
Because it was Memorial Day, we used Google Maps to navigate to the “young men who left home and community to answer the call to help preserve peace and freedom in the world” plaque:
If they hadn’t been killed in wars they could have come home to drink at a brewery under the sacred flag:
The National Park Service explains the alternatives facing the “Sourdoughs” prior to the railroad’s construction:
The gold rusher had to bring a minimum of one ton of supplies up these trails in order to get through Canadian immigration. Unlike today, where being helpless and in need of four generations of welfare enhances one’s admissibility as an immigrant to Canada or the U.S. (as a “refugee” or “asylum-seeker”), the Canadians at the time didn’t want anyone who was likely to become a dependent. Therefore, they inspect a miner’s luggage to make sure that he had at least one year of food.
The railroad promised to change all that, but it wasn’t finished until the gold rush was over (Wikipedia), but the investors still made money because there were other resources, including copper, silver, and lead, to be pulled out of the Yukon. Uncle Sam stepped in to save the railroad from the Depression by taking over the system during the construction of the Alaska Highway in WWII.
Passengers in the uncrowded Alaskan wilderness ready to get on…
The trip starts fairly flat.
At a few points it is possible to see Skagway and any cruise ships docked there:
We sat next to a Mexican real estate developer. He and his wife were big Trump supporters because they believe that Trump will help quash the cartels that compromise safety within Mexico. They do not like their progressive president, Claudia Sheinbaum, due to inefficiency, cronyism, and failure to deal with organized crime. Although not Jewish, they dislike Sheinbaum’s support for Hamas and frequent condemndation’s of Israel for “genocide” (exacerbated in Gaza by rapid population growth). “Even if she were right about Israel,” the Mexicans pointed out, “what does the Gaza war, or any war in the Middle East, have to do with Mexico and Mexico’s problems?”
Here’s a reconstructed border shack where the Canadian government used to try to make sure that immigrants could be self-sufficient:
After one of our locomotives failed, a train in front of us sent back one of its two to help us up the final steep ascent. Then we used our own single locomotive for the trip back down to Skagway. Have faith in timber:
The term “Gold Diggers” has a different meaning here than in the lower 48. From the downtown bookstore:
We decided that the kids weren’t ready for this:
A fun souvenir:
How did ChatGPT do? Fair. The railroad trip is more or less essential, in my opinion, despite the extra sitting time. It’s the only way to experience the reason that Skagway exists, i.e., getting through the pass. Furthermore, it has to be booked well in advance because the trains fill up. There isn’t enough to do in downtown Skagway, even with a hike, to fill up a whole day.
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.
It happened to be what passes for “sunny” in this part of the country on the day that we visited, which isn’t ideal for atmosphere:
The iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t do the best job at managing the contrast and capture the experience:
They make a big deal out of this banana slug, a victim of iPhone overexposure (I don’t know of a convenient way to tell the iPhone “make all of the photos for the next hour subject to -0.7 f-stops of exposure compensation; probably this would have been a good time to use a third party camera app):
Getting to this part of the Park requires a two-hour wait in a traffic line to get in on busy days. Because the entrance fee is essentially zero ($80 for an annual pass that covers an entire carload of humans), the NPS doesn’t have the cash to accomplish the basics, e.g., repair a broken water fountain that the rangers said hadn’t worked for months. If they’d added a $10 per person crowd-control surcharge and the number of visitors fell by 5 percent as a result, that would have given them over $600,000 to fix the water fountain, almost enough even at California High-speed Rail levels of efficiency.
Practical tip: There is a good burger place, Hard Rain Cafe, on the way into the park. It would be nice if they cranked up the burger prices by enough to pay for real bathrooms, though, instead of Graham Platner-style portapotties.
What if you don’t want to deal with a two-hour sit in your rental car, various bathroom emergencies, etc.? There is a similar rainforest roughly an hour’s drive to the south: the Quinault Rain Forest. It’s part of the National Forest.
Because the U.S. Forest Service has decided to charge almost nothing, just like the National Park Service, they can’t do maintenance. Here’s a bench in the middle of this old growth forest that is probably worth $10 million:
Another example:
There’s a nice lodge (with some masked staff members), but we didn’t eat there:
A few miles up the road is the world’s largest Sitka Spruce tree. The trail there includes “Free Palestine” and “Land Back” messages:
A report based on an end-of-May 2026 trip on Norwegian Joy out of Seattle. This report will cover the on-ship environment and I’ll do separate posts for the ports.
We picked this particular cruise because it was one of a handful that visited Glacier Bay and that went round-trip rather than requiring a multi-leg air journey back from Anchorage. As an added bonus, the trip departed Seattle (no need to deal with airport immigration/customs chaos) rather than Vancouver.
Our itinerary:
Cautions that apply to any Southeast Alaska cruise…
The typical cruise ship is designed for the Caribbean and nearly half of her public space will be outdoors. Especially if traveling early or late in the season, these areas will be considered unusable by most passengers and, therefore, the interior public spaces will be more crowded than on a Caribbean trip. We traveled toward the end of the coldest Alaska winter in 50 years and it was still about 10 degrees colder than typical. The outside spaces got little use except when near Seattle/Victoria.
Modern cruise ships are a too big to fit comfortably through the traditional “inside passage” routes. Here’s the Alaska Marine Highway System route:
Furthermore, the cruise lines probably wouldn’t want to pay for a Canadian pilot to be on board for roughly 3 days of any round-trip. Thus, the cruise ships do most of their “Inside Passage” travel outside of the protection of Vancouver Island, for example, and the Pacific can throw much bigger waves at a boat than the Caribbean typically does. If you are prone to seasickness, consider a cabin on a lower deck and close to the center of the boat. These have the advantage of being some of the cheapest cabins on a cruise ship. If you’re determined to splash out on a high forward cabin, just be prepared for your food to also splash out!
Finally, expect the ports to be crowded. A town of 8,000 or 10,000 might receive nearly 20,000 cruise ship passengers on a typical summer day. All of the “downtown” sidewalks are going to be at least as packed as Manhattan sidewalks (not Times Square on a Friday night, but more crowded than an average Manhattan sidewalk). If you want to experience these towns as an Alaskan might, you’ll need to go before or after cruise season and/or do it via air/hotel. If you’re there in June, for example, there is enough light to do a lot of activities after the cruise ships cast off (typically 6-8 pm). This is not to say that the whole idea of Alaska+cruise ship is dumb. A sizable Alaskan town might have only one or two decent hotels and restaurants. The situation is better than when I visited in 1993, but a Hampton Inn-grade hotel remains a rarity. The cruise ship is the only practical means of supporting significant tourism because the hotel and restaurant arrives with the passengers.
Back to our specific cruise. Norwegian Joy was launched by Meyer Werft in 2017 and holds about 3,500 passengers. It lacks an all-the-way-around walking/jogging track and purports to make up for that with elaborate water slides and an electric go-kart track. None of the “wow” items are useful in the cold. Some experts might say that the ship was designed for ants and needs to be at least three times larger:
Here’s a view from above at Icy Strait Point:
It was warm enough on departure from Seattle that some kids were actually using the main pool:
Consistent with other cruise ships, the hot tubs aren’t actually hot. Instead of the 102-104 that a homeowner might set a backyard tub to, the cruise lines are perhaps setting the tubs to 98 so that a guest can sit in the tub for five hours while consuming 10 alcoholic drinks and not suffer any ill effects. The dream of a hot soak while the Alaska scenery scrolls by must remain a dream.
Buffet
More efficient than Royal Caribbean or Celebrity, e.g., with multiple omelette stations at breakfast so as to reduce queuing, but less variety and somewhat lower quality than Royal Caribbean (much lower than on Celebrity). The Indian section is mostly vegetarian for what that’s worth. Despite a high percentage of Filipinos among the crew, there is no Filipino section. Our 10-year-old liked to sneak down to the buffet and get crepes with Nutella.
The Haven
Norwegian lets you buy your way out of much of the noise and congestion by signing up for The Haven. This has its own spectacular lounge looking out the bow from the 17th floor:
We had a two-bedroom family room that was comfortable for a family of four and came with a “butler” whom we seldom used. Our master bathroom:
The Haven has its own restaurant, which turned out to be the best on the ship (see below regarding the specialty dining options), though they didn’t begin to vary the menu until the last couple of days of the journey. Maybe it is for the best from a waistline point of view, but the bakers weren’t capable of making a decent croissant or danish even for Haven guests. Remarkably, however, they did make some good fruit tarts with custard for the lounge. (It is possible to make a good croissant on a cruise ship because Celebrity does it!) Donuts were terrible, below the standard of a supermarket donut.
The Haven has its own sundeck on Deck 19. It is theoretically limited to guests 16 and older, but on an Alaska cruise there aren’t enough people up there for anyone to want to bother enforcing the rule.
The Haven has its own solarium with pool and not-very-hot hot tub:
The Haven concierges would organize escorts on and off the ship and make use of crew-only elevators to eliminate delays at peak times.
Was the Haven worth it? I would happily go on Celebrity again in peasant class, would willington go on Royal Caribbean non-suite, but I wouldn’t travel on Norwegian except in the Haven (about 2X the cost of a standard balcony room for a comparable-size cabin).
Specialty Restaurants
Most of these are $60 per adult as a supplement to a regular cruise fare.
Le Bistro: the 12-year-old enjoyed les escargots; the 10-year-old refused to “take one for the team”. Pretty good overall, though the baguette wasn’t truly crusty. The desserts were interesting.’
Teppanyaki: our chef, Kurian, was Filipino and a great performer. Food quality comparable to what you’d get at a good “hibachi” place in the U.S., but a more entertaining experience. “These shrimp are from Maine,” our chef proclaimed. “… the Main Dining Room.”
Q Smoke House: Imagine H-E-B supermarket BBQ… then subtract three levels of quality. Nice people, both kinds of music (country and western), fun decor, but apparently the inability to operate a real smoker is fatal to food quality.
Cagney’s Steakhouse: they can’t use a gas grill and they apparently don’t want to use a cast iron pan on an induction burner. Consequently, the steaks had no crust and were a bit soggy. The lamb was overly salted. The Prime Rib would probably be the smart choice since it doesn’t need a crust. The desserts were terrible, e.g., an obscenely huge chocolate cake that room service also delivers and a raspberry crème brûlée that was absurdly over-flavored with raspberry. Ice cream at the buffet would be a better choice.
Entertainment
Performances were weak compared to either Royal Caribbean or Celebrity. Singers and dancers were talented, of course, but they weren’t backed up by a live orchestra. The most popular performers on the ship turned out to be a Beatles tribute band (awesome period costumes).
Life on board
Internet: Starlink and much higher bandwidth than what Celebrity delivers. WiFi coverage was excellent throughout the ship.
Laundry: After a few days, Norwegian offers a $40/bag wash/fold service. Unlike other cruise lines, however, they bounce the laundry back to you if you don’t laboriously count what you’ve stuffed into the bag. The “bounce” took 24 hours.
Gym: Big and well-equipped, but not at the bow like some cruise ships have and, therefore, not inspiring.
Coronapanic has degraded cruise ship life, according to our cabin steward. Where Norwegian previously assigned one steward per 16 non-suite cabins, after the post-COVID restart the number is 22-24. Guests who previously received two services per day are now cut back to one. Haven guests receive two services per day, but the first cleaning might not happen until after noon. My memory of Royal Caribbean and Celebrity was that the cabin attendant quietly kept track of our whereabouts and would dart into our room 3-4 times per day so as to undo whatever chaos we had created. In the Haven, by contrast, our cabin cleaner was a nice guy but he cleaned on his schedule rather than on ours. Consequently, we were often in the room when it was time for him to clean or do the turn-down.
Some folded-towel art from Ceasar:
What to Pack
Pack some decent binoculars because it is possible to see otters, whales, seals, and other interesting animals from various open decks and even one’s balcony. What’s “decent”? Nikon Monarch M5 8×42 is the cheapest reasonable binocular. You don’t want more than 8X magnification because the ship+your hands aren’t that steady. The M7 costs more and has a wider field of view, useful when searching for whale spouts. The Zeiss Conquest HDX 8×42 is twice the cost of the Nikon M7, has a slightly narrower field of view, and is perhaps worth the money if you love high quality optics. (Confusing, the Japanese-brand binoculars are supposedly made in China while the German-brand binoculars are, according to our AI overlords, made in Japan.)
Pack a European-to-US plug converter because half of the outlets in the room won’t be usable for Americans. Norwegian won’t lend out or sell converters on board because they’ve discovered that Americans aren’t smart enough to understand voltage and whether a device has a switching power supply. To avoid explosions and fires from people plugging 115V-only gear into a 230V outlet they try to prevent this mechanically.
Do you need to see Glacier Bay?
Should you pick a ship/cruise around the requirement of seeing Glacier Bay? It’s useful for crossing the National Park off your life list, but mostly… no. Cruise ships are so large that they can’t get close to the wildlife that perhaps thrives in the National Park relative to some other parts of Southeast Alaska. There are plenty of alternative glaciers that aren’t national parks that are still beautiful. If you are serious about experiencing Glacier Bay it is probably better to fly to Gustavus and do a day cruise into the park on a smaller boat.
Back in 2023 I wondered Where are the gardens and museums created by the Silicon Valley rich? That’s still a good question, in my opinion. Elon Musk is a trillionaire. In addition to voluntarily paying whatever taxes Elizabeth Warren deems fair, why hasn’t he built off-the-charts open-to-the-public gardens near his spaceports? It’s Elon Musk’s birthday today so maybe he will decide to think about the little people for once…
Earlier in June 2026, we visited the Bloedel Reserve, a 140-acre garden surrounding a fancy house that was all built by a lumber executive and his wife. It’s on Bainbridge Island, a suburb of Seattle made possible by the ferry system.
After they got too old to really use it, they turned it over to the public. Walk through the swamp:
Then over the bridge:
Then through the ferns:
Then arrive at what passed for a “mansion” in the days before trillionaires:
If you’re not a Floridian insistent on warm water, it’s a beautiful view from their back yard:
Everyone needs a Japanese tea house and garden to accompany it:
Speaking of Japanese, how about a moss garden like Saihō-ji in Kyoto?
Land Acknowledgement
The nonprofit that runs the garden admits that the land is stolen. Instead of giving it back to the rightful owners, however, they will somehow “honor” the rightful owners by charging everyone, including the rightful owners, $29 to enter (or $1 for those on welfare who show up with their SNAP card). Reserve in advance because they limit the number of people per hour who enter, a coronapanic innovation that they decided to maintain (or maybe they’re still trying to promote social distancing?).
Who is today’s Anti-Bloedel? I nominated succcessful divorce plaintiff MacKenzie Scott Bezos. Wokipedia says that she gave $26.3 billion to various non-profit organizations, including universities, since 2020. This money, nearly 100% of which was unrealized capital gains, was never taxed by the U.S. Treasury or Washington State (with its fresh new capital gains tax that gave us Jeff Bezos, the Starbucks billionaire who said he wanted to pay more tax, et al.), has apparently disappeared without even a ripple in the waters of the various lakes of crises facing the U.S. Perhaps some nonprofit executives have enjoyed higher salaries as a consequence, but the issues she claimed to care about at the outset of her giving (“racial equality, LGBTQ+ equality, democracy, and climate change”) have all gotten worse. Elon Musk ran away with all of the money and he isn’t Black. Scott Weiner, who represents the full Rainbow Flag spectrum, was recently attacked in San Francisco. Donald Trump was elected to a second term as President (proof that “democracy” doesn’t exist in the U.S.). Climate change, as evidenced by the fully baked Europeans, has gotten far worse. If Sam Bankman-Fried was an “effective altruist” maybe MacKenzie Scott Bezos can be characterized as an “ineffective altruist”? Or maybe altruism simply isn’t effective in the aggregate?
Here’s hoping that MacKenzie Scott Bezos will build herself a magnificent mansion with gardens and, following her death in 2070 (she identifies as female and, therefore, due to all of the disadvantages that women suffer, is likely to live only to age 100), will donate it to the public.
Ruby Beach is the traditional headline attraction for this part of the park:
Due to the government’s refusal to charge market prices (see What if our National Parks charged Navajo prices?), the beach is crowded and the facilities, in this case outhouses without running water, are grossly undersized for the number of visitors. We were there well before peak season and look at the line:
The beach is dog-friendly, though!
Kids love the tide pools here:
Imaginatively named “Beach 4”, however, had a larger and sadder animal-related sight: two dead whales, one a baby humpback and one a young gray whale. A worker at Kalaloch Lodge blamed Donald Trump for the whales’ deaths. How did Trump kill the whales? By authorizing increased ground fishing, e.g., for halibut, which she said interfered somehow with the density of the food that these whales like to eat. ChatGPT:
What she has right: gray whales are bottom feeders. They eat seafloor invertebrates, including amphipods, by scooping/sucking sediment, and bottom-contact fishing gear can damage some seafloor habitats. NOAA describes gray whales as primarily bottom feeders eating benthic and epibenthic invertebrates such as amphipods.
Where the claim likely breaks down: the major NOAA explanation for the recent gray-whale starvation/mortality problem is not “more groundfishing,” but localized ecosystem changes affecting access to and quality of prey in the northern Bering and Chukchi seas. NOAA says those prey changes caused poor nutritional condition, more deaths during migration, and fewer calves.
The “Trump allowed more fishing” story that is in the news mostly concerns opening Pacific remote island marine monument waters to commercial fishing, far southwest of Hawaii, and a broader deregulatory push. That area/policy is not the northern Bering/Chukchi gray-whale feeding ground, nor the Olympic coast. A federal judge later blocked the Pacific monument rollback, according to 2025 reporting.
Also, the key Alaska/Bering Sea bottom-trawl habitat regime was not newly created by Trump. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council says Bering Sea measures adopted in 2007 and implemented in 2008 “froze the footprint” of bottom trawling and created major trawl-closure areas, including around St. Matthew Island, St. Lawrence Island, and Nunivak/Etolin/Kuskokwim Bay. On the West Coast, NOAA says the groundfish plan has long included habitat protections, including more than 100,000 square miles closed to bottom trawling or all bottom-contacting gears since the 2006 Amendment 19 action.
Regardless of who killed them, the poor animals ended up as backdrops for tourist phone images:
(If Greta Thunberg were still interested in climate change, rather than Gaza, she might be interested to learn that ChatGPT says “Arctic warming → less/changed sea ice → less high-quality bottom-dwelling prey for gray whales → malnutrition during migration” is a plausible explanation.)
This beach also has some great tide pools:
Our base was a cabin in the Kalaloch Lodge, somewhat rustic but the having a kitchen was awesome. Be sure to stock way up on groceries before heading here, though, because the on-site store has a limited selection. The restaurant is reasonably good, but all of these remote places struggle with the fact that the American workforce no longer contains a significant number of people willing to travel to a seasonal job, even if that job is in the middle of a world-class national park.
The weather, mid-50s in early June, was perfect for this Pitbull of the Oberland (Bernese Mountain Dog):
The woods on the other side of the road have some hiking trails.
Today is the Pride Match in Seattle, which “features a globally controversial matchup between Iran and Egypt, two countries where homosexuality is heavily criminalized. Despite objections from both nations’ football associations, FIFA is permitting rainbow flags and human rights displays inside the stadium.” (Google AI, citing The Atlantic)
Where else do Islam and Pride intersect in Washington State? Port Angeles, Washington. This was where would-be jihadist Ahmed Ressam was arrested on December 14, 1999 after Customs agent Diana Dean became suspicious of “Benni Noris”. The Algerian who had been enriching Canada had more than 100 lbs. of explosives in his rented Chrysler, intending to blow up LAX (for anyone who has been forced to travel through LAX it is tough to know where one’s sympathies should be in this situation).
The town is situated up against the Olympic Mountains:
What would the noble Islamic migrant have seen if he got off the ferry from Victoria, B.C. today? No huge sign or even small plaque at immigration or at the ferry honoring agent Diana Dean, despite the fact that she likely saved hundreds of American lives:
If Mr. Ressam had walked into the local office of the Democratic Party he would have been welcomed in Arabic:
At the front door, the Democrats specifically say that immigration/customs agents such as Diana Dean, Port Angeles’s greatest hero, aren’t welcome:
Context for the above:
Ahmed Ressam would have learned from the Democrats that the whole idea of borders is illegitimate:
Ressam was actually ordered deported from Canada due to his career as a criminal there, but because he refused to assist in his deportation by providing a passport he was allowed to stay in Canada indefinitely. (He is now living at taxpayer expense here in the U.S.) He could have learned this effective strategy from the Port Angeles Democrats (“Do Not Carry Any Documents From The Country Where You Were Born”):
Ressam could have drawn inspiration from RBG: “Fight for the thing you care about” (in Ressam’s case, Islam and Al-Qaeda).
Ressam would have been invited by the Democrats, and by at least half of the other downtown storefronts, to attend the June 14 “Pride on the Pier” festival:
What else would the noble Ressam have seen inside this office?
In the pantheon of resistance heroes, Jew-hater Martin Niemöller, who later become disillusioned with the Nazi Party for which he voted three times, is featured.
Strolling down the street…
What’s in the bookstore window?
(the front door had some more invitations to Pride events and Queerville)
Generally speaking, the town’s storefronts were examples of Rainbow-first Retail, in which the sacred Rainbow Flag must be passed by every customer.
Would would Ahmed Ressam have been enjoying as a snack after his ferry ride, but for Diana Dean’s interference? The “New Zealand-style” ice cream shop next to the ferry offers a Rainbow Sundae and a Pride Float:
How about some reading? The second downtown bookstore had a reasonably rich selection:
That’s it for Port Angeles!
Practical Tourism advice: it’s tough to plan a trip to the northern part of Olympic National Park more than a day in advance if you’re hoping to get up to Hurricane Ridge and actually see anything. There are some decent rainforest walks, though, even when the ride is covered in clouds.
We stayed at Olympic Lodge by Ayres, which might be the best hotel in town. Unfortunately, the WiFi is throttled to 10 Mbits under the best of circumstances and, therefore, it might not be practical to get a lot of work done while waiting days for the weather to clear.
Readers: Who enjoyed the Pride soccer game between Iran and Egypt?
After two nights in Rainier National Park, we stopped in Olympic, Washington. The town’s passions are summarized beautifully on State Ave. Stonewall Youth, a group that hosts “drop-ins for queer+trans youth 12-21”, is surrounded by unhoused neighbors (the encampment in the photo below is one block away) and has not a single sign regarding what might be done to assist the unhoused. At the same time, the group is occupied with pro-Hamas advocacy: “Nothing but Hate for Israel and Zionism; Nothing but Love for Palestine and Liberation: from gaza to the americas, decolonization means attack!” (they don’t want to decolonize Olympic, Washington and give the land back to the Native Americans?)
5.5 years after coronapanic, indoor masking remains common in Olympia, but some locals go the full distance into delightful Outdoor Masking (not shown: the homeless guy in the background literally dancing to his own tuen):
Captain Little, a toy store, joins Stonewall Youth in combining advocacy for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ with advocacy for a Hamas-ruled society in which non-heterosexual sex is a criminal act:
Instead of collecting money to help their unhoused neighbors, a couple of whom walked by the store during the few minutes that I needed to get the photos, the toy store is raising money to help a 23-year-old Gaza “demolished home that was bombed by the IOF”:
Children are invited to a couple of Pride events:
One shopper who would absolutely love this children’s store is Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever:
Speaking of children, here’s what they experence at the Browsers bookstore… The front window:
Specifically in a section marked “Children” within the store:
(It is a little unclear what will happen on Juneteenth in Olympia, Washington. The U.S. Census says that the town is just 3% Black. Based on our walks around downtown, this seems like an overestimate.)
Featured for the parents, in the adult area:
At the front of the store, a reminder that the apparently meek person sitting in an armchair with a book is actually a brave fighter against fascism.
The edge of the building that holds the bookstore is devoted to a massive “Oympia-Rafah Solidarity” mural. The State of Israel is compared to the United States in terms of illegitimate occupation of land that properly belongs to the indigenous, but there is no indication that any of those behind the mural project have returned the land underneath their own houses to the rightful Native American owners and started paying rent. Curiously, the mural says that “no human is illegal” and the anyone can immigrate into the U.S., which seems to be inconsistent with their opposition to Jews having immigrated to British-administered Mandatory Palestine and, after being expelled from Arab/Muslim countries, to the State of Israel. Finally, note that not every Jew is a bad Jew. a Jewess who “refuses to occupy” might be acceptable:
Loosely related, the local indigents get a cheerful mural backdrop:
The sacred Pride mural is desecrated by the presence of rubbish cans in front:
The crosswalk murals are kept clean:
The local flag store sells everything but the American Flag:
Here’s a store that advertises a “No Hate” festival and also warns people to “Beware of [hate-filled?] dog”:
Maybe the dog doesn’t want to “Make America Gay Again”?
Shopping for women’s clothing is an occasion to ponder “No Kings”, Ukraine, Equity, and Immigrants vs. ICE:
Shopping for flowers is a time to remember to “Protect Trans Youth” and that “Queer is Normal”:
There is a huge disconnect between the interests of contemporary Olympians and those of the folks who set up and decorated the State Capitol. War is glorified, including our illegitimate war against Germany in 1917 (after providing a lot of help to the British while officially neutral, we declared war on Germany, untimately winning a “victory” that resulted in Adolf Hitler being elected):
The State of Washington officially flies the sacred Trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag:
It’s magnificent inside, the entire Marble Island of Alaska having been mined to decorate the interior (chandeliers from Tiffany):
Slaveholder George Washington is honored and, on the flip side, Martin Luther King, Jr. (the great man visited Washington State just once, spending four days in Seattle at a time when 1% of residents were Black):
The plastic aerosol virus shields that went up during coropanic are still there in the state offices where the public might show up. Perhaps nobody has had time to read “Those Anti-Covid Plastic Barriers Probably Don’t Help and May Make Things Worse” (New York Times 2021): “erecting plastic barriers can change air flow in a room, disrupt normal ventilation and create “dead zones,” where viral aerosol particles can build up and become highly concentrated.”
It’s Father’s Day. For those handful of American men who have any control over their kids’ lives, a suggestion….
If you’re anywhere near Tacoma, Washington and haven’t been carjacked yet (Tacoma is “safer than 1% of U.S. cities), the LeMay car museums are well worth a stop. The primary one is near the Almond Roca factory in Tacoma proper and styles itself “America’s Car Museum”.
We were there for a special American Supercar exhibition, in which the Corvette and Ford GT were featured prominently.
Here’s an astonishing 1000 hp Oldsmobile:
GM loaned the museum the C8 Corvette test mule:
Those who loved physics class will appreciate this 1923 Lincoln, the first car to drive over the doomed Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940:
If you need a last-minute art idea for America’s 250th:
Thanks to Harold LeMay’s fortune built hauling garbage, the museum has magnificent examples from every era of the automobile, a 1906 Cadillac, for example:
A 1930 Duesenberg:
A wartime Chevrolet:
A 1954 Chevrolet wagon that would be awesome to own with retrofit A/C:
If Greta Thunberg hadn’t segued into pro-Hamas activism, this would be the perfect 100 mpg car for her, from aircraft engineer Jim Bede:
In order to skip out on Tacoma’s reputation for violent crime, we stayed in the new development of Point Ruston, a bit to the northwest. Fortunately for Florida real estate values, the breakdown of order in the West Coast cities is still in evidence. A CVS in the moderately-rich area locks up the precious laundry detergent:
Immigration has resulted in a random assortment of humans with conflicting cultural and religious values. Below, Muslims complying with Islamic dress codes are juxtaposed with (1) a pet dog (haram), and (2) a female rollerblader shamelessly displaying her bare midriff:
Our good fortune with the weather and Mount Rainier views continued:
We’re informed that Floridians are stupid. The hyperintelligent progressives of Tacoma, however, need to be reminded to close the water tap after filling a cup at the ice cream shop:
The coffee shop nearby has a complete Righteous Boomer No Kings Rally Starter Kit:
The fridge magnets for sale during morning coffee include one that situates anti-Trump protest in the context of Martin Niemöller-level heroism (which makes sense since The Reverend Niemöller hated Jews almost as much as today’s progressives and actually voted for the Nazi Party three times!):
Although the residents of western Washington State are surrounded by neighbors who are in obvious need of assistance, e.g., due to being unhoused, their political energies go into parading around in front of each other to show how much they hate what Donald Trump is doing 3,000+ miles away in D.C. Here’s the reading material provided at the coffee shop:
The next morning we hit the LeMay Collections at Marymount, a less-glitzy venue in south Tacoma. This shouldn’t be skipped! We opted for a docent tour, which included a ride in a Ford Model T and a visit to a massive car warehouse that is normally off-limits.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if Stellantis brought back the AMC Pacer?
The Collections includes a large exhibit on the Elon Musk of the 1940s, Preston Tucker. Promoting the public sale of stock in an unprofitable company whose products were delayed did not make Tucker a trillionaire, however, but got him prosecuted and shut down by the U.S. government. Tucker beat the rap, but the company was killed. Tucker’s design had a lot of safety features that would gradually appear in mass-market cars over the subsequent 30 years. The museum explains that the original design even included seatbelts but that they were removed due to a fear that the public would infer that the car was more dangeorus than existing designs. One design goal was that the engine and transmission could be removed and a loaner engine/transmission swapped in. This would take less than one hour and would enable repairs to be done offline.
How much fun would it be to have this Edsel station wagon? Our docent reminded us that Edsel Ford shouldn’t be associated with business failure, despite the lack of success of the Edsel cars that were introduced after his death. It was Edsel who twisted his dad’s arm into adding the Model A to Ford’s product line as an alternative to the Model T, which Henry Ford considered to be ideal.
The Collections has far more cars than the downtown museum and they don’t always get a lot of room for display and walking around:
There are a lot of gems, however, and the place is well worth 2 hours. You’ll learn about at least a dozen car brands that you hadn’t previously known existed. Below, I learned about an entire class of car that I hadn’t heard of, the “cyclecar“. 14 hp out to be enough for anybody, as Bill Gates famously never said.
Just imagine how much surplus oil we’d have if people did most of their errands in a modern version. Even with 1913 technology, this machine supposedly achieved 40 mpg at 40 mph (more than enough speed to get around Seattle and, in fact, even 15 mph was overkill during a lot of our time on I-5).
What do the taxpayers of Sitka, Alaska get at their local public libary? Here’s a report from a May 2026 visit.
(Alaska has no state income, estate, or sales tax, but residents of Sitka pay property tax and also a sales tax of 6 percent (summer) or 5 percent (winter).)
It’s a beautiful waterfront building with awesome-by-pathetic-US-standards free WiFI:
A bulletin board with community announcements greets visitors:
(The Juneteeth celebration will likely resemble an Ibram Xolani Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) book club because we didn’t see a single African American local or visitor during our day in Sitka. Even the Labrador Retriever who protected us from brown bears on the Totem Trail was yellow rather than Black (the Lab’s owner appeared to be white).)
Featured books by the front door:
A featured book in the kids’ section:
(So far the locals don’t seem to have followed the leader into wearing hijab.)
The teen section reminds kids in Alaska that climate change will ruin their lives unless they follow the lead of Indian-born environmental journalist Meera Subramanian and become climate activists. (Thought experiment: Suppose that both Phoenix, Arizona and Sitka, Alaska became 10 degrees warmer. Would that make real estate in Sitka more valuable or less valuable?)
The book could perhaps use an update. Climate Change Alarmists now demand cheap oil and complain about gas prices being, in nominal dollars, nearly as high as they were in 2022, but the book praises those who obstructed the Dakota Access Pipeline. The book celebrates Tonopah-style concentrated solar power, apparently disagreeing with Popular Mechanics that “The $1 Billion Solar Plant Is an Obsolete, Expensive Flop” (2020). See also “Solar plant on I-15 near its end, shutting off in 2026, officials say” (2025) regarding the Ivanpah dream.
Teens are also reminded that “the perfect family” does not include any white people:
Circling back to the adult section, some books that the librarians chose to feature:
The book on “How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City” is interesting. The New York Times tells us that Black New Yorkers haven’t been replaced by Asians and the Latinx. It is just that New York City now has fewer Black residents and more Asian/Latinx immigrant residents (e.g., see “Why Black Families Are Leaving New York, and What It Means for the City” (2023)). The book explains that the non-replacement of Blacks by Latinx has “saved” cities.
If you’re in Sitka, don’t forget that Rainbow Storytime (pre-K through 5th grade), from the above poster of Pride events, is happening today at 10:30 am Alaska time. Storytime raises a question. The library is funded by taxpayers and, therefore, we have to assume that the majority of taxpayers support whatever the library does. Outside of San Francisco or Massachusetts, though, how many of us have heard a parent say “I am taking my child to the Rainbow Storytime at the library now”?
Speaking of Massachusetts, it seems that the Boston Public Library is hosting 19 drag queen story hours this month. Here are a couple of examples tagged for children of various ages:
