20240917 Tuesday, September 17, 2024- Valdez, Alaska

20240917 Tuesday, September 17, 2024- Valdez, Alaska

The ship was at anchor off Valdez when we pulled our curtains open.  The bay is surrounded by huge mountains.  I wasn’t expecting this since this is the terminus of the Trans-Alaska crude oil pipeline.  That must be a tribute to the engineering required to bring crude oil from the north slope oil fields to the coast.  

Valdez at sunrise

Our included excursion was simply titled “Valdez on Your Own”.  There was no guided coach tour of the town, but a shuttle ran a circuit around the city that linked 3 museums and the civic center and included tickets for admission to each museum.  

This was our first experience with tender operations on a Viking Ocean ship.  The embarkation was quite easy since the seas were very calm.  The tender ship was also a little nicer than on the Princess Cruises in that they had a rigid polycarbonate sliding door instead of heavy duty neoprene/vinyl curtain to close off the boarding entrance.

The city is small enough that it would have been possible to walk between all the museums, but with intermittent rain, it was nice to be able to ride in the shuttle, even if it was school buses with very tight leg room.  

Valdez Pilot boat

Viking Tour Shuttle

Valdez Mermaid

The first museum stop was the Valdez Museum, which was primarily focused on telling the history of Valdez.  It did a good job of telling the story of Valdez, staring as a gateway to the Yukon gold fields.  

Bear-Gut waterproof and windproof jackets- Organic Gortex

Fancy Miner's Cabin

Upscale Valdez dwelling

Fur Fish run with Jackelopes

Credit Card embosser buried in mud by the Earthquake

and recovered years later

First Barrel of Crude via the Trans-Alaska Pipeline

Notorious Exon Valdez

Gold Dance

Lifeboat #4

When the gold and copper played out, it became a fishing and marine trade focused port.  Then in 1967 was destroyed by the most severe earthquake recorded in North America (Richter 9.2) and forced to relocate, 4 miles from its original site so it could be built on solid bedrock instead of fill that liquified during the earthquake.

The next big gold rush came in the form of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.  Then it suffered from the Exon Valdez shipwreck and oil spill in Prince William Sound that changed the oil shipping industry worldwide forever.  

The Exon Valdez wasn’t the only ship that floundered and caused a fuss.  In 1980 the Holland-America Prinsendam had to abandon ship due to an engine room fire.  Miraculously, there were no deaths.  370 passengers arrived in Valdez on a supertanker and their lifeboat #4 now sits in front of the museum.

The Whitney Museum was the next stop, and it was a very different sort of museum.  It houses a collection of items gathered from around Alaska by Maxine Whitney, primarily to sell to tourists, but also for her own personal collection.  The museum has some of the best Alaskan taxidermy I have ever seen, in addition to a huge collection of Alaskan wilderness themed furniture, carvings, dolls, art and clothing items.  It is an incredible collection and displayed very well.

The third museum was actually an annex to the Valdez Museum primarily housing a large scale model of Valdez as it existed before the 1967 Earthquake.  It also housed additional vehicles and displays.

The final stop on the tour was the Valdez Convention and Civic Center which houses a huge comfortable cinema which played videos of Valdez.  Some of these were shown in the other museums in part, but it was certainly a more comfortable venue for watching videos which covered the Gold Rush Era and the Earthquake.  

After getting back to the ship we had naps, and Ben got in a run and hot tub soak while Janet watched The Man from Snowy River, and some on board lectures in the room.

Dinner was back in the Chef’s Table featuring Xiang cuisine, which was a mash up of Cantonese and Huaiyang cuisine which originated in the Ming and Qing dynasties.  Our local China Harbor still makes a better hot and sour soup, although the tiny nouveau cuisine portion made it hard to fully appreciate.  

There was a crispy shrimp dish which was a bit overcooked for my tastes and drowned in seasoned bread crumbs.  The highlight for us was the coconut and ginger granita “palate cleanser” between the first and main courses.  This was light and refreshing.  The main was “wok-fried Beef”, but it could very well have been hibachi styled beef in large chunks, which was tender and juicy, slathered with a dark pepper and hoisin sauce.  The dessert was a chilled mango cream, which was encapsulated in air brushed white chocolate and looked almost too good to eat.  It was similar in texture to the peach mousse dessert we had last night in The Restaurant.

The evening wrapped up with a second show by Janien Valentine, who did another high energy and powerful show with music from pop-opera, Shania Twain, Norah Jones, Tina Turner and even an original single she did during the pandemic called Survivors, which is available on iTunes to help her put her kids through college.  So far the entertainment has smashed our preconceptions of inadequacy that were imprinted by our first experience on the Viking Star.  Viking has really stepped up their entertainment offerings since that 2018 cruise.

Tomorrow, we call on Seward, Alaska.  Our included excursion is a self guided visit to the Seward Sea Life Center.  We’ll have a longer day in Seward, so we may be able to sleep in a bit.