about Juneau

In case you’re curious about the city…here’s what we’ve figured out so far.  It’s small.  It’s about 31,000 people, but it feels smaller because it’s essentially an island.  You see the same cars (and people) over and over, which originally struck me as odd, until I realized – where else will people drive? It’s not like you can easily go anywhere else.  The main highway in town runs along the coast and is maybe 50 miles end-to-end.  The city is squeezed between the channel and the mountains. 

You could probably drive every single (paved) road in Juneau twice, or more, on one tank of gas.  There’s not that many places to go.  That may feel really limiting some day.  We’ve had no difficulty finding stores, which seemed to happen a lot when we first moved to Charleston.  

Speaking of stores – there’s some chain stores but not many.  We have a Home Depot, Safeway (groceries and gas), Fred Meyer (groceries, dept. store, and gas), Costco (it’s small though), Walmart, McDonalds, Subway, Starbucks, Domino’s Pizza and Papa Murphy’s (these five may be the only chain restaurants in town), Napa Auto Parts, JoAnn Fabrics, a small Petco, Radio Shack, Hallmark, and maybe a few others (but certainly not a lot more).  Speaking of McDonalds – we were starving and it was getting late after a day of errands and messing around with the RV and storage locker and stopped in for dinner on the go.  It was definitely more expensive than the lower 48 – maybe $6-8 for each of the extra value meals.  The tray liner listed every McDonalds in the state of Alaska – and there’s only 30!  In the whole state.  There’s probably more than that in the greater Minneapolis area. 

I haven’t had too much sticker shock for groceries.  Gas I knew would be rather expensive (we paid $4.19/gallon the other day, which was about what it was in Washington State).  I’ll do a grocery price comparison one of these days, as I remembered to write down prices on some of the more common things we bought in Charleston.