Alaska Cruise - Day 4 :Skagway Liarsville & Red Onion Saloon

After getting off the train, we went to Liarsville for a Salmon bake, a quick show and gold panning.

For the skit, they recited and acted out "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill" by Robert W. Service.

You can read the poem HERE.

After the show, we tried our luck at panning for gold.

Our last stop of the day was the Red Onion Saloon. To read the description on paper, it sounds like a wild time. It even says children under 16 not allowed. We read some reviews, and most people had a great time. One person complained it wasn't family friendly. We spent months joking about it. "What did they expect? Its a brothel house, not a nunnery!" The guys would joke about stuffing dollar bills in their tops. So us girls would joke about flirting with the lumberjacks we would be seeing later in the trip.

In the end... total disappointment. The wildest it got was our tour guide saying her name was Ida Dunhim. We got a quick (and very crowded) tour of the upstairs where the brothel used to run back during the gold rush. Then we went down stairs, and it was over. They have a restaurant downstairs, but we had just come from the salmon bake in Liarsville so we weren't hungry. Maybe if we had stayed to eat it might have been better.

 I will admit, I am a VERY JEALOUS wife. I had some great anxiety leading up to this. But that morning, I woke up determined to have a good time. So for me to say that even I was disappointed I think says a lot about how let down we all were.

That is rhubarb and its only half the size of what it will be by the end of summer.

We saw Sarah Palin in the store and Josh had to get a picture with her.

After our excursion ended, we had time to sight see and do a little shopping. I'm glad we bought our souvenirs there because we never got another chance. I bought some books for the nephews, some rhuberry jam for our parents, a nice drinking cup, two magnets and a necklace.

While waiting on the first day to board the cruise ship, they handed us a coupon book. As we looked through it, I kept seeing this pretty necklace of the state flower. It was the one thing I wanted to buy for myself. I thought it would be easy to find since it was in the coupon book several times.

It took 12 stores! Most stores didn't even have something like it. At one store, they had a very cheap one that was scratched up. Then at another store, we found a diamond one in three sizes. The smallest was $50 and it was teeny. The biggest was $100. I didn't want to spend that much, so I decided to try to the end of the street. If I still didn't find one, I'd think about coming back.

Finally in the very last store, I found exactly what I had been looking for. Later, when we ran into Todd & Randi, I showed it to Randi and she loved it too. So we went back to the store so she could buy one too.

We had to be back on the ship that afternoon. Since we had a little bit of time before dinner, we decided to finally open our red wine.

Dinner that night was in the Summer Palace.