First stop - Sitka

Our first port was Sitka. I didn't at first realize that the port is about 10 minutes from the town, so we couldn't see the actual town. Turns out we only ended up seeing it from a bus ride. We didn't plan this very well. We got off the ship a couple hours before our excursion time. There were several gift shops and a restaurant, but what to do for 2 hours then? There was a movie/history thing we could have paid to watch, but it overlapped with our tour time. I guess we didn't realize that's all there was when we got off. We did look through all the shops and killed about an hour, found some snacks to purchase. Why we didn't hop on one of the free buses that ran back and forth between town, I have no idea. It was like a 10 minute ride and we could have killed an hour in town and then came back for our bus tour excursion. BUT, in our defense, after we got off there was this non stop line of thousands of people getting on these busses to town, so I think that was our main reason for just staying put where we were.

The excursion we had picked out was to a bear sanctuary. It wasn't that great of a place, really. Kind of sad. About 7 or 8 bears, kept about 2-3 bears per area. It was also not that nice of facility. I think we were there less than an hour and then back to port. We were offered to be dropped off in town, but we would have only had a half hour or so and had to make sure we'd catch a bus to make sure we'd be back by 4:30 so we decided not to risk that. At least it was a nice day of like 60 degrees. 

A view from the ride on the tour bus. Both of our tour bus drivers (and the train ride guide) were great and full of information about the areas.

We got back on the ship around 4pm and were hungry, since we never had lunch and only the snacks we bought, so we tried one of the cafe's on the ship for a sandwich. We had to agree that all the sandwiches we tried on the ship were not that good, which was surprising, since all the other food was so good. Since our dinner time wasn't until 6:45 we needed something to eat that day, so a sandwich it was. We had tried to see if the buffet was open, but it was closed at that time, as they were getting ready for dinner.

Overall, though, we enjoyed getting off the ship and seeing the scenery around us. What little I saw of Sitka - it did not look like the movie "The Proposal", which is one of my favorite movies, LOL. (I think I read before they actually filmed it at a New England coast town and CGI'd the backdrop scenery in)