Alaska Cruise

August, 2009: Blake, Donalee, Grandma Bird, and Shelby (and Donalee's parents & sister) went on an Alaska cruise. This is our group formal night photo. It seems whenever we are on a cruise, the shortest line for photos is for the tacky "Titantic" background. So we opted again for the shortest waiting line. We now have several cruises all with this same background. Oh, well.

Here are a few shots from the cruise.
Shelby holding a sea star on our rafting shore excursion in Ketchikan.
Blake as part of the cruise juggling show.
Our double decker bus tour in Victoria, Canada. Every cruise that leaves and then returns to the USA has to have one international stop. So Victoria Canada counted as our "international" stop. The city was beautiful. I would love to vacation there for a weekend.
The US Flag and Canadian Flag side-by-side. We rode a train (below) that left from Skagway, Alaska. It went up over the White Pass. It was a huge engineering feat in its day which was during the Gold Rush days. Thousands of Gold Seekers would flood Skagway, Alaska to get to the Canadian Yukon where gold was being found. It was a long journey by foot to hike through the mountains from Skagway, cross into the Canadian border, and arrive at the Yukon Gold Rush cities. A train was constructed to make the trek easier, but took so long constructing, that by the time it was done, the gold rush was pretty much over. The track scales huge mountains and hangs over deep gorges and ravines.

Blake & Donalee in front of the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska. Juneau is unique in that there are no roads constructed to travel to it, even though it is on the Alaska mainland. You can only get to Juneau by boat or plane. I guess the mountains are too rugged to put a road there? The most popular mode of travel is by ferry or your own float plane. I had never seen a float plane before (only on Fantasy Island) but by the time the cruise ended, we had seen many and saw them take off and land in the water.

This is a fish hatchery in Juneau. It is spawning season right now, so all the salmon were coming back to their birth places to spawn and then die. These salmon in the picture have come back home to the hatchery (their birthplace) and are awaiting to spawn. Then the hatchery will kill them instead of waiting a few weeks for them to die naturally. The salmon that go back to their birthplaces that are not hatcheries (usually streams that go into the coastline from the ocean) spawn and then die, then there is a huge stench in the cities each fall from all of the dead fish. The hatcheries kill them, so that they don't slowly die for 2 weeks, and then they get rid of the carcasses so they don't add to the stink. The spawning salmon are too old for their skin or meat to be of any worth, so they are discarded whole. So I guess I learned that the best salmon are middle-aged (2-3 years old) and still in the ocean and not traveling home to spawn and die.
This is actually a sister ship that we sailed next to, but our ship looked exactly like this one. The scenery every day was mountains and lots of trees. The Inside Passage was a fun choice. Here, there were a few icebergs floating in the ocean. We went in August, so an earlier cruise would have had more floating icebergs, but the later date allowed us to get closer to the glacier.
Blake on Grandma and Shelby's balcony. See the pretty mountain right behind him. A little bit different than our Caribbean cruises we have been on.



















Blake & Donalee on Grandma Bird's balcony. Sawyer Glacier in the background.















Better view of the Sawyer Glacier















We went on a shore excursion in Ketchikan, Alaska in motorized rafts. We traveled over 30 miles of Alaska coastline in this fun raft.
















Shelby and Grandma Bird on the balcony. They were upgraded to a nice suite and had a double size balcony that was a huge success.