It was a long boat ride from Ainsworth Bay to Pia Glacer so we did not have an excursion in the morning and everyone stayed on the ship until after lunch.
We again selected a ‘Low Physical Demand’ excursion but this time it had mud, slope, physical activity and medium educational content since we walked up the slope to a lookout spot. We walked past the glacier and watched a small calving(where a piece of the glacier breaks off) and then walked into the forest. The trail was a bit steep and I thought the rock would be slippery like the granite in Yosemite but the rock wasn’t slippery but the land (mud, lichen, moss) was slippery. I held onto the rope next to the trial until I realized it wasn’t taut and wouldn’t keep me from falling.
When we got back from the walk in the forest, we watched the glacier hoping to see more calving and took the second to last zodiac back to the ship. The last zodiac had the guides.
When you leave the ship you must wear a lifevest, you remove a keychain with your number on it from your lifevest and put it on a hook in a cabinet. When you return you take the number out of the cabinet and put it back onto your lifevest. If the cabinet has no keychains/numbers in it after all the zodiacs return, then the staff knows everyone is on board.
When you get to shore, everyone takes off their lifevest and puts it on the shore. At the end of the excursion, you pick up a random lifevest to wear back to the ship. Some folks try to ‘hide’ their lifevest in order to get the same one when they return but that doesn’t typically work since someone else usually finds and uses it. Then the folks that ‘hid’ their lifevests are upset.
The route to our next stop took us thru Glacier Alley where there are a number of large/named glaciers. We were served food/drink to match the glacier nationality. We had beer and sausage when we went by the Alemania (Germany) glacier, cheese and wine when we went by Francia (France), pizza when we went by Italia (Italy), and Ollenballen when we went by Holanda (Holland).
