harryfat1

After that, it was back to the ship at 1:15 PM as all abord was the much earlier 2:15 PM instead of the original 5:30 PM if it wasn’t for the high tide in Vancouver that forced us to leave earlier. I think if we were there later, we would have walked back down and check out some of the hills of Ketchikan as I saw some good views of the port area from YouTube. Oh, well, maybe next Alaska cruise in 10 years. Security screening at the atrium area as we came back to the ship. As always, security team members get their pay reduced if they are seen as being friendly to the cruise passengers Buffet lunch. I really like these meat dishes with rice Seafood was pretty good - note they serve you. Can't touch that... Desserts Got the specialty coffee after lunch as it was part of the package

Few more ships pictures We did stop at the big store in front of pier #4 to check out the merchandise as a lot of people were inside shopping. I forgot to take picture of the place but we got some Ketchikan holiday ornaments for a good price.

As we headed back to the pier area, we wanted to get some smoked salmon as that’s what the many of the stores were selling. The prices are the general stores for the pre packaged smoked salmon were not cheap and only 4 or 6 ounces. So we headed back to the salmon specialty store we saw earlier that had better pricing and we got some there to bring back as gifts for folks back home Walking to the salmon specialty store

Good question. Sorry to say I don't know my salmon types. Per this site, there are 5 types of salmons in Ketchikan: https://www.experienceketchikan.com/types-of-salmon.html

This is the funicular that you could ride to the top of the lodge. Another way to get there for free is walk the "Married men's trail" we skipped few posts ago. We did the walk back in 2009 and got to the top of the hill and then took the funicular down. There is a cost to go up but coming down is free but it was not operating the day we were in town. Most shops After buying whatever souvenirs we wanted, we made a full circle back at #25 where we were earlier Chinese Restaurant No idea. Not taken by me...

#24 – Dolly’s House. Various workers trying to persuade people to pay admission to see the historical place using adult suggestive language. A tad uncomfortable if you are traveling with a family as the workers (ladies in green and purples dresses) our front are trying to imitate a prostitute in getting people that walks by to go in for a $10/pp tour As there are various shops on Creek Steed, time to visit the uncle in prison (aka shopping) Oh, yeah, a lot cheaper than what ISP was selling their jackets. Although the range of sizes are more limited at Creek Street as maybe more people buy them here. For $5 more, you can get the similar jackets at other stores in Ketchikan. Regardless, as we all need to buy some sort of souvenir for folks back home, this is the port to load up For the Star Wars fans out there

Looking back at #22 – Stedman Street Bridge Interesting to see maintenance workers down beneath working on the support beams Earlier on, I couldn’t get a clear picture of the salmon swimming but they can be easily seen at this section of the Creek. Yeah, even an inept fisherman like yours truly might be able to catch a salmon or two if I cast a line right over the bridge

#23 – Creek Street. The official sign of the area. This is probably the most iconic area of Ketchikan with the colorful houses over the creek. No other area of town is as famous as this area

OK, I'm assuming most people didn't download the PDF version of the Ketchikan walking tour map, so I have traced in blue on where we have walked so far. We started from the lower left hand corner and now walked almost to the opposite corner and now will turn south back to the cruise dock area: Now we make a right on Deermount Avenue to go past the residential part of Ketchikan Looking at the map to see where we are Making a right on Steadman Street. Saw another tour bus drive by Some sort of police action going on as various sirens were going off as couple of police trucks (not police cars as we are in Ketchikan and not regular metropolitan city) were whizzing by We are now back to where the cruise ships docked

Thanks for the compliment. I believe many people reading your current cruise report will be raving about your contribution to the forum as well. At the end of the day, as cruise review writers, we hope to pass on whatever cruise info we have experienced to future cruisers so they can all enjoyed their vacations.

#13 – Bridge crossing gets you to #14 Hatchery (kind of weird back entrance) and then #15 Park area You have to walk around the fence to get to the park Part of the free downtown shuttle that makes a loop around the area if you don’t want to walk or if the weather is bad. #16 – Totem Heritage Center – If you are interested in looking at more totem poles, you can go there to check it out

It was easy fishing by the creek as there were literally hundreds of salmon swimming in the water: They let couple of tourists from the sourdough hold onto the catch for photo op The dude actually caught this himself

After more than enough salmon pictures, we made a right on Park Avenue from #11 (see the sourdough shuttle leaving as well) to get to: #12 – Ketchikan Creek. Just the upstream part of the creek where at the bottom is where the famous houses on stilts are located. We will get there later as we wrap around. Anyway, you see some people fishing by the creek as the same sourdough tour stopping there:

Thank you for the kind words and glad to have you as a current reader. Lots of pictures and reading info to catch up. Call me Harry. Harryfat1 is my screen name as I used to be Harryfat as that was my screen name from the 90s here on CC but I stopped cruising for awhile after the boys were born and stopped reading CC. Then when I came back, I forgot my login info but back then I was using the ancient email from AOL (you know you are old when you had AOL email address). So CC was sending their login authentication to an AOL email I no longer have as they used to charge $$ to have AOL accounts. That meant I couldn't get back to my old "Harryfat" account. So I had to create a new login name and just added a "1" to the end...

Very nice. I don't have the patience to stand for a long time to try and find the one perfect photo. I just overwhelm the readers with lots of mediocre photos instead - quantity over quality...

Haha, yeah, sorry, in my 87 page contract with CC, there is a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) whereby I can't discuss the compensation package as CC pays various reviewers on a different scale so any leak of info will be a major disruption to future contributions of reviewers. Yes, part of the pay scale is based on a number of "likes" we can garner from our trip reviews. So to borrow the phrase of every YouTuber - please like and subscribe - as Cheapo Dad needs $$ to pay for his brand new Samsung phone that he barely knows how to use.

#11 – Fish Ladder. They built this to help the Salmon out. This area is extremely popular as all the tour shuttles drop off their people here for photo opts. Remember this sourdough tour as we will see them later on Since we were lucky enough to visit during salmon season, we saw a lot of salmon action. Think we stood there for at least 10 minutes taking various pictures and videos. So you are wondering - what is the guy talking about? I can't see any salmon. Yeah, hard to tell from the dark waters but in live video below, I will show them moving and it'll be more obvious. This next picture, I will point out the salmon in the picture. Later on when we go to another area where the water is more clear, they will be much more obvious From the video you can see the movement of the salmon 20220811_103600.mp4 If you are REALLY serious about catching salmon spawning, you can be THAT GUY and bring your serious camera hardware and stood there forever trying to capture the perfect shot. Heck, I’m just keeping the photos for myself and CC upload, so good enough is good enough until CC pays me more for my efforts...

Technically this is not a number on the map (maybe it’s TT?) but here’s a famous salmon statue that shows the direction the salmon go to spawn (upstream). So crossing over the bridge, along the walkway, you soon come across the infamous “Married Men’s Trail” where legend has it is where the various Married Men sneaks up at night time to visit the brothel at creek street. We walked up that trail back in 2009 and it was fairly steep to go up but the sign said the trail was closed so we didn’t try it this time.

All Righty, onward with the Ketchikan walking tour: #6 – Chief Johnson Totem Pole So you would think the next stop is #7 - right? Naw, that would make this walk too easy/boring. We wouldn't want that, would we? Let's go to #25 (Yeah, you need to find it on the map) - Bridge area to the famous Creek Street on the "back end"

Thanks for the offer to email but I will just do a screen shot to share over at the RCI site. Nice to have something "different" on the next cruise as to keep things from being stale.

Thank you for the compliments and for reading along all these past years. Appreciate the referral of having your friends read my trip reports. For all your troubles, I will forward you my standard 2% referral fee of whatever CC pays me due to increased viewership from your friends.🤪 One of the primary audiences of my trip report are to the newbie cruisers as I am just a newbie +1 myself and since we never cruise on the same ship twice, I write every report from a perspective of a newbie sailing on that ship for the first time. For Princess, this is really easy as I haven’t sailed on a Princess ship since 2002 so I’m definitely a newbie to Princess. In case anyone checks my signature – the “repeat” of Westerdam on HAL is in name only as HAL recycles their ship names so we were on two different ships. I vacation through my camera (cell phone) so I need something new to photograph on every cruise. Can’t do that on the “repeat” ship so every vacation will have that newbie excitement & perspective when I come back to write the next installment to share my experiences with future cruisers. One never say “never” but we are the “One and Done” with all the ships we have sailed on. Even my favorite ship, Allure of the Seas, we will never go back on her but will pick another ship in her class. Princess offers a solid product. I just find the entertainment venue lacking/not within my demographics. Yeah, I noticed a disproportionate amount of trip reports here are on the high-end cabins. Very few reports are of inside/Oceanview cabins. My default cabin is Oceanview as I can’t do inside cabin. The last time I was in an inside cabin was the 2002 cruise to Alaska and I was sick as a dog on my back for 1+ day. Need to have some sort of horizon to look at to calm my stomach – besides wearing the sea band and taking meclizine & ginger products. The Royal Class doesn’t have your traditional Oceanview like the Grand Princess or else I would have booked those cabins for our Alaska cruise. My previous 2 cruises on RCI were Oceanview and technically inside view as RCI classifies Promenade view as Inside view.

Ketchikan proclaims themselves to be salmon capitol and as such, you will see lots of salmon-based souvenirs. We bought some from here but that’s for a later discussion So you will either see jewelry stores or Salmon stores as you walk around town I'm sorry, silly me. There were Princess approved clothing stores as well...Don't even need to bring a wallet. Just pay by "ding" your medallion. #5 – Whale Park. Small city area with totem pole

Oh, yeah, people are here to read about Princess Alaska cruise... Ketchikan has a very savvy tourism bureau and they provide a free walking guide map inside the store front right at the pier and online. Back in 2009, we followed more or less the map to tour the town and we wanted to do it again this time and take pictures of the boys to see how much they have grown through the years. So for the rest of the town tour, I will be referencing landmark numbers based on the map if anyone wants to follow along. We won’t be going exactly from #1 to whatever the last number is as some areas on the map wasn’t interesting to us but at least with a map to guide whomever is still reading this post (blog). You can get the map downloaded from here: https://www.experienceketchikan.com/ketchikan-walking-tour.html It's going to look like this: With description of each number on page 2 (Yeah, Good luck trying to read that so you need to download the PDF version from the web page): Minor point is that the map is technically outdated as I think the actual physical map you get at the visitor center has extra places but for our purposes, let’s assume these are the right numbers as I’m too lazy to find the actual map and scan it. As a point of reference, we came from the far-left side of the map past the Eagle Park (#34) so technically we visited that first but we will get it on the way back. Being an anal bean-counter (I know, that’s redundant), I like to start with #1 and not #34. #1 – Visitor Bureau. Pick up the map inside to start the walking tour. Hey, A FREE Map? Yeah, Cheapo people like FREE stuff...I wanted to make it to the top of the hill where the front of the map is but we ran out of time/energy on our short stay in port #2 – Welcome Arch. Yeah, take your obligatory pictures here. Don’t be shy as everyone and their cousin is doing it as well as we saw many groups taking pictures here Hey, look, what a surprise. A jewelry store. Never knew they would have jewelry stores in Alaska…Wait, is that Bob sitting in the husband-seat there?

No worries about coming in later to the potluck. I always appreciate photo contributions – especially since you just came back from your cruise. Wow, that Princess Love Boat Dessert is very…RED. Other than Valentines Day, not sure if that has strong visual appeals the rest of the year. I wonder how much autonomy each Princess ship has to do as they deem necessary to deviate from the “Corporate Standards”. Between the desserts and muster drill and different meal time at MDR between Europe and North American sailings, it seems one could get a different cruise experience if they take one Princess ship versus another Princess ship. Maybe it has to do with Princess ships are positioned all over the world and as such, Princess Corporate in Southern CA can’t realistically dictate what a Princess in Singapore must do to follow everything as per fleet wide standard? Yeah, at least the Majestic Princess had mustard. Now that I’m thinking about it, the only time Chinese would use mustard is with dim sum or dip in sauce as with cold cut appetizers at a banquet dinner. The dim sum and cold cuts would never show up at the buffet or hot dog stand thus they must never need mustards until the American cruisers boarded. Thanks for the Mooring Line picture. We have a Mooring Line Fan Club over at the RCI boards where we share various Mooring Line pictures from our cruises. “The boys” would be interested to see this picture with the cat to scare the rodents away. Ship version of the Scarecrow. What port was this picture taken? We never even talked to a “white coat” head waiter guy no-one ever came over to our side. On other cruises, I can’t wait for the guy to leave as he always shows up while we have food in our mouths and asking how was our day as if he knew us. Then on this cruise where I could have used him to help with 1) seating 2) food allergies, he’s nowhere to be found. Technically I asked to speak to him on day 1 of the cruise but the gal wouldn’t let me talk to him. In theory, I could have insisted to speak to any supervisor or walk up to any white coat on day 2 but I didn’t want to make a scene. Maybe under the same umbrella of “different Princess cruise experience depending on which ship you are on”. We can have a separate thread on what we do behind the scenes as trip writers in preparing for our threads as not everyone understand the work behind “making the sausage” – apologies to the international readers for using the American slang.

If you get a very large drive like a 5TB drive, you can just copy over all the old drives into the new drive as a way to consolidate them. Unless those drives are very recent, doubtful all of them together will be 5TB so you can just consolidate them into one drive. Create a file call: "Digital Pictures" in your new hard drive. Then create one folder for every year and then month of the year with a naming convention like 01 2020 and then 02 2020. So your drive will look like: Digital Pictures>2020>01 2020 or 02 2020 and so on. Then you drop in all the old pictures from the old drive into that month and repeat for all old drives. It will be a massive exercise for sure if you have lots of pictures but once you organize them by month and possibly by event if you have multiple events in the month (say weddings/birthdays/vacations), then you create even more sub folders in that month. But whenever you are done, you will have one place that has all your photo memories by date. That's how we do it and I can quickly find our 2009 Alaska cruise pictures quickly. In theory, I can find any vacation picture we have taken as long as I know the date under this system.