So anyway, mrs_bat and I just got back from our Alaska cruise. Turns out that our cruise was the venue for the (at least) third annual "Hogs on the High Seas" cruise tour.

On a ship with 2400-ish passengers, fully 500 of them were Harley-Davidson owners/enthusiasts and their families. Not only did they fill up an entire floor of the dining hall for the late seating, but their group was 2/3 as big as the population of Skagway, our first port of call.

Picture it if you can. We're on a luxurious cruise and one out of every 5 people is a large bearded fellow in a sleeveless and/or leather jacket and covered with tattoos, or a corpulent woman married to such a fellow. And all this in a floating hotel-slash-jewellery store with no place to ride.

They were such a large group that they had their own activities in their own reserved areas of the ship, and their own channel on the stateroom TVs announcing their itinerary. They had activities in every port of call, including visiting bars and shops in scavenger-hunt fashion. I was amazed at how many of them managed to find Harleys to ride in Ketchikan. They also had a belly flop contest in the ship's outdoor pool.

One of the bikers was a reverend - you could tell by reading one of the patches on his jacket or infer it from the cross tattooed on the back of his head. He performed a wedding ceremony for a couple of the HOHS crowd in some bar at one of the ports of call.

They're good people. The ones we dined with from time to time made excellent dinner companions, and some of them were almost as well-traveled as Howard. The ones with kids actually parented them, which is always refreshing on a cruise.

Oh, and we saw some ice and lumberjacks and wildlife and whatnot. Picked up some important bear safety tips:

1) If you are part of a large hiking group and you come across a bear, all the hikers should link arms and form a circle. As long as the guide is in the center of the circle, he will be perfectly safe.

2) Brown bears are brown. Black bears are also brown. The easiest way to tell what type of bear is chasing you is to climb a tree. If the bear starts climbing up after you, you've got yourself a black bear. If the bear grabs the tree and starts shaking it till you fall, that would be a brown bear. If you keep running and running but you can't find any trees at all, it's a polar bear.

^v^:)^v^
F"why is salmon so expensive in the 'salmon capital of the world'?"B