DV, Day 5

I get up earlier on vacation than I do in real life.

At 6 am, night turned to day when the alarm went off and the light went on. We met in the buffet for breakfast and then got off the boat (we were in Skagway) for our next excursion - glass blowing!

A short bus ride to Jewell Gardens with our excursion director, who happens to be a professional bum of sorts - he has nowhere to call home, just a backpack and a few seasonal jobs, from what I gathered - and we were ready to get started. There were only ten of us in the group, which was nice, and we got to know a cute gal our age who was on her own (there were three of us, so it seemed natural to pair up with her to make an even four).

Our glassblowing expert/teacher was a guy in his mid-twenties who has been blowing glass for 7 years. His goal was to make it fun and entertaining, and he succeeded. (He also reminded me of a former colleague, which was super weird and made it impossible to remember his real name.)

The colors and patterns we chose from

We all picked 1-2 colors, a pattern, and whether we wanted gold leaf on our glass ornament, and then we each had the chance to work with our instructor to make the ornament.

The glory hole - a furnace where you re-heat
the glass so it is hot enough to work with

He did the hard stuff, and we did the easy stuff - turning the glass on its rod as it heated in the glory hole, blowing as he shaped the ornament, etc. At the end, we each got a cheesy picture (this was a mandatory part of the process!) with said instructor.

(As you may have noticed, I generally don't post pictures of entire people, so just imagine two people in an "awesome, thumbs-up!" pose, one wearing a thick gardening-type glove to protect his hand from burning while holding the still-super-hot ornament.)

Adding colored glass to the clear glass we started with

The ornaments had to "cool" in a 950 degree oven all day (and then it was turned off in the evening to continue the cooling process overnight) - otherwise the glass would shatter from the sudden extremes in temperature. After we made all ten ornaments, our instructor made a horse - in about 30 seconds.

A rearing horse, made without having to reheat the glass

Then we had tea. Seriously. Linen napkins, goblets with lemonade, and snacky foods - including cucumber sandwiches, carrot cake, a triangular cheese pastry, salmon quiche, and a rhubarb dessert. It was all yummy, and ended up substituting as lunch (of course, we didn't determine that until later).

After tea, we wandered through the gardens, which were beautiful and ornamented with blown glass. Like this blowfish.

Yep. He's wearing a cowboy hat.

We won't talk about my favorite flowers in the garden, because somehow I didn't take a picture of them, and by the time I tried to write down what they were, I had forgotten the name.

After our excursion ended, we went back to Skagway's downtown and shopped. It was a lot of walking even though downtown was not very big. We stopped halfway through to buy cold water at a local grocery market - that was the smartest thing we did. Once we finished shopping, two of us stayed and watched a movie about the Klondike gold rush (and Skagway's part in it) and then went on a walking tour with a Historical Park volunteer. It was interesting - thousands of people trying to get to the gold by doing crazy things like hiking Chilkoot Pass in sub-zero temperatures with a year's supply of food. Did I mention that the end of the Chilkoot Trail was all stairs? Yep. Stairs carved out of the snow and ice. I'm glad I wasn't a gold prospector in 1898. There are easier ways to get into Canada.

By the time we got back on the boat, we were exhausted. The evening entertainment was a show by a world famous (discovered by America's Got Talent) juggler. He is better at that than I am (or ever will be).

The end.