More from Ziggy:
This morning saw another half-day's worth of seminars. The XML and MySQL seminars continued, as did Randal's PROM course. Tom talked about idiomatic Perl, and mjd gave his usual head-exploding regex tutorial. Some of the speakers, and doubtless some of the attendees, were running a little late this morning, probably due to the partying we all did after formal night last night. It didn't matter too much, because overnight the ship changed timezones, from PDT to AKDT (Yes, AKDT).
Around lunchtime, we docked in Juneau, the largest city in southeast Alaska. mjd and I went looking for a copy shop to make some last minute handouts, but in the end we were unable to do so. I mentioned that we might be able to find some facilities at our next port of call, Skagway Alaska, but he reminded me that most cities of 400 people *don't* have Kinko's franchises. (As I write this update, we are docked in Skagway, and this is in fact the case. mjd++)
Later in the day, a few dozen cruise passengers gathered to find some of Juneau's finest malt beverages. We started our pub crawl at the Alaska Brewing Company and took the brewery tour. (We didn't actually go through the brewing facility as they were currently brewing.)
The Alaska Brewery is truly a beergeek's mecca. This small unassuming facility won the best brewery of the year award at the Great American Beer Festival three years in a row, within their first five years of operation. Their Alaska Amber beer is a truly wonderful recipe resurrected from the gold rush days of 1898. Their Alaska Smoked Porter (which is presently unavailable) is renowned across beergeekdom (at least it is to beergeeks who like porter, smoked foods and smokey beverages; OK, so *I* like it). Alaska Brewing Company is in the bittersweet position of being successful, but unable to expand geographically. Every year they expand their brewing capacity, but sell their entire production in Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and California; if you don't live there, you may not get a chance to see why I've spent a paragraph talking about this brewery.
Later on that crawl, we stopped by a few more pubs, (ordering Alaska Brewing's fine products, along with healthy amounts of Guinness, stressing out the wonderful local bartenders along the way) grabbed some dinner-snacks and wound up near the ship. At 8:30 PM AKDT many of us ascended Mt. Roberts, conveniently located within stumbling distance of the Volendam. After a very quick tram ride up to the top, we stopped for another quick one, saw some breathtaking views and took lots of pictures.
Since we had about 45 minutes before the very last tram of the evening, we wandered around the observation area and some of us even started throwing snowballs. Sure, it's May, and we're wearing tshirts and shorts, but it's Alaska, and the snow just started calling out to us. (Perhaps that was the beer. I guess we'll never know.)
The boat left Juneau at 10:30pm, with at least one person in our party arriving at 10:29:20 (Hi, Geoff! Glad you could join us!). Tonight we take a quick jaunt up to Skagway for another day's worth of shore excursions, trinketeering and enjoying the sunny weather.
Your intrepid reporter, Z.
