JUNEAU: We were lied to. When we reserved our rent a car with National we were told we would be picked up at the dock. Four months later when we exited the ship and called National we were told they no longer pick anyone us and suggested we take a cab to airport. We did for $25.

We had been to Juneau before and had been there on a Saturday before. So on this Saturday we knew the town would have garage sales all over the place. We weren't disappointed. In the neighborhoods surrounding the Mendenhall Glacier there were two or three garage sales per subdivision. There were probably 50 garage sales on the island. We stopped at about 11. The best was at the house of a guy who like on the TV show Storage Wars bids on abandoned storage lockers. We got enough Alaskan knick-knacks to hand out some fun awards to several crew members for a total of $2. Plus I got three jazz CDs of Mel Torme and one classical Mozart CD for a $1.

Across the bridge from Juneau is the old City of Douglas which merged with Juneau in 1970. The library on the main street through Douglas is very nice. It offers free internet and has older magazines for free and used books for sale.

Thank God the real tourist season had not yet started. It allowed us to take a one lane (with turn outs) gravel mountain road up a for beautiful views.

The second cab ride back from National at the airport for another $25 was the only thing to spoil my day.

We flew to California early to spend a couple of days in Carmel by the Sea. Since we could never afford to live there two days is a nice alternative.

The trip taught us a valuable lesson. If we are renting a car WE WILL NEVER FLY INTO SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT AGAIN. We will fly to Oakland or San Jose but not SFO.

I have some heart issues that making walking through airports a little dicey. At SFO from our luggage it was long walks, multiple elevator sides and a train ride. Then at 6:30 it was a 30-minute line at Dollar Rent a Car. We only picked Dollar because we could drop the car off at the Sheraton Fisherman's Wharf Hotel where we were staying the night before the cruise.

We got to Carmel after the front desk at the Fireplace Inn had closed. However, we called ahead and the staff placed our keys in an envelope and taped it to the front door.

Once we arrived we found that somehow Mr. Peabody and Sherman had allowed us in the Wayback machine and we were transported back 56 years in time to 1960. Other than the flat screen TV everything in our room could have been seen in the room in 1960. The toilet was so low to the floor without any grab bars for a person with bad knees it was a super challenge to get up. But we were in Carmel to see the coast, not stay in a hotel room. Plus two nights at the best hotel in Carmel was going to cost us $1,400 while the Fireplace Inn was only $400.

Driving on California Highway 1 in the Big Sur area or north of Sausalito are perhaps the best drives in all of America. The next day we were head to San Simeon. We had been there three times before. The weather was perfect. Clear skies and no tourist traffic yet. My wife did another tour of the Hearst Mansion/Castle while I stayed in the visitor's center reading Michael Connelly latest novel for three hours avoiding the hundreds of stairs on the tour. (I was amazed that the gift shop no longer carried "Citizen Hearst" by W.A. Swanberg, long considered the best biography on Heasrt. I bought my copy in the same gift shop 35 years earlier.)

On Saturday we drove to San Francisco along Highway 1 hitting heavy traffic about 35 miles south of S.F.

WRANGELL On Sunday we were in Wrangell, a town of around 2,000 that only smaller cruise ships can stop at. The assistant manager at Practical Rent a Car, the only rent-a-car company on the island, picked us up at the dock. The city's one grocery store was closed, but two auto part stores and two hardware stores were open.

While Sitka has three gas stations, Wrangell only has two and one of them is owned by the owners of Practical Rent-a-Car.

Frankly you can see most everything in Wrangell and drive every road in four hours. This was one of the several locations where ship tours were on school buses. We felt fortunate to have a rental car.

Wrangell has a six officer police department. Normally one officer is on duty at a time. The officers also have to be at the airport twice a day when the two Alaska Air flights between Anchorage and Juneau then on to Vancouver with stops in Wrangell, Petersburg and Sitka stop for 15 minutes. The cops do passenger screening. If the one on-duty officer is tied up with an arrest or a bad auto accident, the dispatcher starts calling the five off-duty cops until she finds one to go to the airport. It makes you want to whistle the theme to the Andy Griffith Show.

KETCHIKAN: This was our last port of call. The very nice people at the Alaska Rent-a-Car picked us up and took a back. The return trip included showing us some streets we had missed. Nothing much had changed in Ketchikan compared to our two other trips there. We did several of our "end of the road" trips and once turned onto a gravel road outside of Ward Creek rec area. At first it was okay, but then the potholes filled with water slowed us down to under 5 mph until we gave up, but completely trashed the outside of the car.

Later in the summer the salmon run up creeks in downtown Ketchikan. Also there is a fishery just above downtown. While it sometimes gets little snow, Ketchikan is one of the wettest cities in the country. It was raining hard when we got off the ship. They are installing one artificial turf athletic field, but most athletic fields are crushed gravel as grass would never survive one football or soccer game. Even the softball fields are of crushed rock.