Last week the Garden City News' publishers took a cruise vacation to southeast Alaska, starting in Anchorage and traveling south to Vancouver, British Columbia. This was a once in a lifetime trip in which we heard glaciers calving, watched humpback whales feeding cooperatively, and saw bald eagles flying freely. At the risk of sounding like we've been bribed by the tourism board, Alaska is such a unique place to visit that we'd recommend it to everyone as a once in a lifetime experience.

Although we were trying to "get away from it all," with our unerring nose for news we found ourselves in the middle of one of the two major national news stories of the week, when Governor Sarah Palin resigned the day before we visited Juneau. It was very interesting talking to local residents there to get their impressions of her, which weren't good. The folks we spoke to didn't think much of her performance as governor. (While it would be nice to be able to write the trip off as a business expense, we suspect the IRS wouldn't be impressed that we interviewed a couple of cab drivers and a waitress.)

And still more evidence that "no matter where you go, there you are" was the slogan of the historic gold mining town, Skagway, Alaska. Skagway, which is incidentally a lovely little town set against majestic snow topped mountains, calls itself "The Garden City of Alaska."

But even though both Skagway and our Garden City have lovely gardens, there probably isn't much else in common. Notably, the breaking news story in this week's "Skagway News" begins as follows: "Breaking News - July 1 - Police shoot bean bags and crackershells to scare off black bear after it ventures downtown near City Hall on busy ship day. The bear had gotten into garbage in the area the previous evening."

Not exactly something that would appear in this Garden City's news!

Meg Morgan Norris

Publisher