North to Alaska! Kevin & Renae make it to 20 years!

So many things to tell you and so many pictures to post! Please be patient.
This is the beginning of our journey. This is the ship that we boarded on August 28th. This ship was on one side of the dock and a VERY big Princess ship was on the other side. Our ship held about 1400 passengers. They have it so very organized and we boarded in no time.

The first thing we did was check out our room and then we headed for the Lido deck. Apparently it's not only the Love Boat that has a Lido deck! It was cool because the roof opened and it was a beautiful day in Seattle. We went right to the buffet to start getting our monies worth.

 This is a picture of the back of the ship, check out that wake! It was almost as wide as the ship and we were trucking along at a pretty good pace. You can tell this is an Alaskan cruise by looking at the sky, cloudy! We had sun here and there, but lots of clouds!

 These were our New York friends we met while we were there. They took us under their wings and schooled us in the ways of cruising. This was like their 25th cruise or something. We were at the same table as them in the dining room. From L to R is Frank, Meg, John, Judy and myself. Frank was Italian and said he worked in 'sanitation' in Buffalo. Meg's parents own an olive oil place in Sicily, they both came to America from Italy. Sound a little familiar (Godfather???)? Who knows, but we sure had fun with this group. They told our wait staff that we were there for our Anniversary and they sang to us and gave us a bottle of champagne (even though we told them we didn't drink--and I promise, we didn't!). We got good advice from them in the form of "forgettaboutit" and other Italian stuff we couldn't understand! We left the champagne for our room porter, hope he enjoyed it!

Way up in the distance you can see Juno. Did you know there are no roads that go into Juno? You have to get to Juno by boat or plane. We decided to go by ship---a big one with swimming pools and spas.

We were on the ship sailing a whole day before we got here, and yes, you can feel the ship rock--I don't care how big it is! No puking took place however. You can tell we were all anxious to get off and go exploring.

When we got into Juno we saw these planes taking off and knew we were next!

Here's a shot of some of the beautiful scenery we saw. These are two different glaciers carving out the landscape.

This is a picture of a glacier and it is calving, meaning chuncks of it are falling off into the water. The blue (in the cracks) was so bright it looked fake.

 This is the lodge that we flew in to. The plane taking off and landing on the water was so smooth it wasn't scary at all. This lodge has been there for lots of years and when we got there they fed us fresh grilled Salmon---it was awesome! Notice the glacier in the background, that view did not suck. We only wish we could have stayed there longer.

 After the cook fried up the Salmon and got it all cleaned up we went in and ate, and look who came out to clean up after us. He could care less that we were there. Apparently this is a regular thing at the lodge, but great for the tourists!

After this little excursion we went back to Juno and wandered for awhile. Of course we HAD to get some king crab legs while we were there. We also had the best crab bisque soup, yummy! The ship did not stay long so we didn't have too much time to do much and then we were off to our next stop, Yuckatat Bay and Hubbard Glacier. Before we left we got a chance to call home and found out that Jake had been stung by a bee and had to go to his first day of 4th grade with his face all swollen up! Thank goodness that Grandma Oswald was around to help out.

I can't explain how great this day was. It was SO beautiful. We spent like 3 hours up on the deck as we were sailing into Hubbard Glacier. It was cold! Thankfully the ship was prepared with all the hot chocolate we could drink. We did, however, have to buy the thermoses which cost $14 bucks a piece. Oh well, they are great souvenirs and at the time we didn't care!

We learned that in order for a floating chunk of ice to be considered an ice berg at least 12 feet has to be above the water. This was not quite that big, but almost. It's hard to tell because we are still so far away but up ahead is the very big Hubbard Glacier.

 There is really no way that these pictures do this place justice but they are still cool anyway. This glacier was bigger than our ship and I think it was at least 9 stories tall. The greatest thing about this was that this glacier is not receeding, it's still moving and carving out the landscape as it does. We stayed here for about an hour and could have stayed here all day. We got to listen to it move and it sounded like the loudest thunder you've ever heard. Then sometimes big chunks would fall off of it into the ocean (calving) and the water would spray way up in the air. We had a Tlingit (pronounced Klinkit) tribe member narrating our visit here and we were just outside the crows nest on the deck. When we looked up to see him, he had on a BYU hat! We knew then we were in great company.

 This is a very interesting part of the glacier. As you can see it is almost closing off the water because it's getting so close to the land. They expect it will do that sometime in the future and cause a dam, it has done that before and the sea level rose like 90 feet behind it before it broke free. Wow....

Here's a great view of the inlet to the glacier. It did get sunny and warmer when we were at the glacier, it added to a most wonderful day. From here we headed back out to the Pacific on our way to Sitka. Here's a shot of Kevin enjoying the deck.

We got to Sitka after sailing all night. We were the first group that got to disembark for Sitka because of our ATV excursion. There isn't a dock that accomodates the cruise ships so you have to tender, that means we get in one of the life boats and it takes us into the shore.

As you can tell, Sitka was beautiful! There are little islands all over the place. Again, you can only get here by boat or by plane and there is only 14 miles of road--total--in the whole town. This was the first town that was settled by the Russians and where the purchase of Alaska by the USA took place. There is Russian influence in the buildings and it is a beautiful place. We took an ATV tour of an island that had a volcano on it (I can't remember the name!). The sand was black and the trees were huge. Here are some pics from the ride.

 We had to take a boat to get to the island, it took about 20 min to get there and some of the water was pretty rough as it was coming right in from the open ocean, but it was fun!

There is something like 30 miles of road on this island because it was logged at one time and the roads were left behind. The residents of Sitka boat their ATV's over here and use the island to hunt and play on.

We were the first ones to be on the beach this morning and it was georgeous.  The view you can see in the landscape picture above looks out to the Pacific ocean. There is no body of land between here and Japan. Our guide said there are some wicked storms that hit this beach. The Forest Service has a cabin out here that you can rent but there is no electricity or water--it's really roughing it! After Sitka we hit the water again and headed for Ketchikan.

It was raining like crazy in Ketchikan! Apparently they get over 13 feet of rain a year and it rains over 300 days! So, it was normal for our guide and he took us out crab fishing. Kevin volunteered to pull up the pot, so he's getting on his gear.

 The pots had dungeness crab in them. He explained to us how to tell the difference between a boy and a girl and what ones they can keep. I think they had to be over 6 1/2 inches wide and they could only keep the boys. I got to hold one and you can see I'm holding down the pinchers!

 After we got done fishing the crab (we put them back) we got to come back to the lodge and had all you can eat. Notice the tower of shells that we left behind. You might want to know that this was like 1000 in the morning, so eating crab was a little weird--but it was still YUMMY!

We were only in Ketchican for a few hours so this is about all that we saw, another reason that we need to do this again!

Here's a shot of our last formal night in the dining room, they served us Lobster. I think Kevin had like 4 of them! BTW, isn't he handsome?

So, one of the reasons we took this cruise is because the Jack Stack chiefs were on the ship and they were doing cooking schools. Since you can't really have fire on the boat, we really couldn't BBQ (makes sense now, but not when we booked!). So, they made it up to us by teaching us how to make lobster mac & cheeze, cheezy corn bake, and other yummy stuff like bananas foster. Chief Kevin made our class the bananas foster and was everyone's favorite friend because it was awesome!!

I know this is a crummy picture but it's the reason we were on this cruise, to learn from them. This is Todd and Andrea Hulse and they are the lead chiefs for the catering part of Jack Stack. They gave us a bunch of free shwag and it was super fun to hang with them. We got to eat the meal we made in the most fancy resturant on the ship, our class only had 14 people in it and it was so cool!

Our next stop was Victoria, but I have no pictures to share with you because we didn't get to dock. The weather was windy and dangerous enough that they wouldn't let our boat dock. We got to sit in the harbor and look at the city from the ship for 6 hours--we didn't even get to get our passports stamped! I think it's a sign that we need to take another trip and leave the country so we can get our monies worth out of our passports! We got into Seattle the next morning and our journey was over. The interesting thing is our messages finally came through on our cell phones and the first text we got was from Brent Johnson asking for our insurance information because they needed it for Nick's MRI. What? Evidently Nick got injured in his game on Thursday and they thought his knee was messed up and thus the MRI. Thankfully the MRI came back negative and all was well and he's back on the field but our family had a few challenges while we were gone, and great people took care of them! Well, thanks for reliving this journey with me. It was a fantastic time and I would recommend it to anyone thinking of going. So fun and so worth it. Now the 21st anni is going to be a let down. :)