I’ve taken some amazing bike trips such as my trip to Skagway, Alaska where I biked down White Pass Summit!
Our trip started with a two hour train ride on the White Pass – Yukon Route into the Yukon Territory in Canada. We boarded in Skagway and traveled north to a summit elevation of 2865 feet at the White Pass summit.
There we got our bikes and started down on our 15 mile bike trip.
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If you like to drink, eat and be merry, the Duval Crawl is something you ought to try. Great for groups of friends.
Bars line the entire length of Duval Street, Key West, Florida, 33040. As you crawl from one bar to the next, you hear so much live music coming from just about everywhere. On the street, there were street musicians, in the bars there was an excellent variety of mostly late 60s to late 80s music. However the Irish bars still played their traditional folk music.
Here is the Duval Crawl List
Bull & Whistle
801 Bourbon Bar (had the drag queens out front)
Bourbon Street Pub (had the shirtless bartender)
Green Parrot (live music, funny signs)
Virgilio’s (stuffy, can’t eat in the window seats)
Rum Barrel (where we had great onion soup)
Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Café (foofoo drink land, packed all the time)
The Top (roof of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, see slideshow for photos from the roof)
Hard Rock Café (ok place, but nothing that special)
Fat Tuesday (wall o frozen drink machines, many flavors ready to go)
La-Te-Da (where we had shrimp cocktail, shrimp good coctail sauces, not so good)
Rick’s Key West (live music, draft beer, long bar next to Durty Harry’s)
Captain Tony’s Saloon (suprise entertainer at Hemingway’s place)
Sloppy Joe’s Bar (loud, crowded, young and fun)
Hog’s Breath Saloon (folk music, older crowd, nice place)
Pier House Resort (really nice hotel at the end of the street)
Here are a few of the bars on the Duval Crawl List: No snivelling, excess in moderation, hippies use side door, enforcing the two-tooth minimum at the Green Parrot. Come inside and see the invisible men the signs all said. We went inside, I had a Newcastle. This bar is NOT on Duval, but its on our list. This place has live bands.
We had frozen drinks at Fat Tuesday. They had a whole wall of frozen drink mixers. I had a Rum Runner – 151 Rum, Banana, Blackberry and Tropical Punch with Pineapple Juice. Got a brain freeze.
If you like drag queens, then you need to go to the show. Don’t look now but that one wants to talk to me. I said hi, then we went inside the bar portion of the place, we didn’t make the show. There were two bartenders who were serving a full bar like it was a walk in the park. They were fantastic as they waisted no moves mixing complex blender drinks. It was as if they were in a ballad and we were watching them dance around and make drinks. Oh, did I mention that this was a gay/transvestite bar?
These guys were great at the Hogs Breath Saloon. They played 60s folk music such as Simon and Garfunkel.
The Bull and Whistle bar are two bars in one. The Bull had nice live entertainment and a good variety of draft beer. This was our first stop, I ordered a Key West Pilsner, it was ok.
These guys were great, one played a 12 string guitar, the other, a 6 string.
Sloppy Joe’s was a young crowd with very loud music. The place was packed, yet the service was good. But this was not the Sloppy Joe’s that Ernest Hemingway frequented when he lived in Key West. If you want to have a drink at Hemingway’s favorite watering hole, you have to go to Captain Tony’s.
The live entertainment was just ok. But when this patron asked if he could play a few songs, and then did, the place came alive with appause. I guess he was better than most.
Here is the unknown entertainer’s photo take at Captain Tony’s.
I am sure Hemingway sat right where I sat at the bar. It was a lovely bar and the people were all nice and friendly. Many of the people at Captain Tony’s appeared to be local.
From Captain Tony’s to Jimmy Buffet’s Margarettaville Cafe to The Bull, even drinks in the 3 gay bars on the list, the walk along Duval and its side streets gave us three nights of fun bar hopping. And yes, we conquered the entire Duval Crawl list, having a drink at each one, but it took us 3 nights to do it.
The best thing was really the food. There were so many restaurants, great seafood, steaks, salads and more. I think we might just do this again.
Here is my pictoral visit to Sawyer Glacier in Alaska, USA. This visit was interesting due to how close we were able to get to the glacier in the huge Royal Caribbean cruise ship.
Sawyer Glacier is located about 100 miles south, south east of Juneau.
View Sawyer Glacier in a larger map
Though not as well known as Glacier Bay, it is at least as spectacular if not more so. Located in the Tracy Arm Fjord, Sawyer Glacier is one of Alaska’s most massive glaciers.
Its 6am, its cold and it takes quite awhile to navigate down the fjord as it is long an narrow. We pass the right side of an island as the ship barely makes it threw the narrow passageway. still no sight of the glacier as we bend around yet another corner. Then finally we see it, the Sawyer Glacier.
As we approached the glacier, we see an ice and snow formation that looks as large as the surrounding mountains. This is an amazing glacier living at the far end of of Tracy Arm Fjord. We see an amazing iridescent blue mass of ice that reminds me of Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, we had seen earlier in the week.
We heard the loud noise boom around us as the ancient Sawyer glacier calved off a chunk of ice. The ice probably was a big as a house, but it’s hard to gain perspective from the distance we were viewing.
