Alaska 2

A few months ago, Elle (one of the girls from tennis) came over and she used my machine to make quilts for her sisters that live in Australia that were both having babies this year. Then she found the little outfits in Florida when she visited. It was a fun project and I learned a lot about my machine!

Flowers in the front yard. Why do they bloom and die so quickly?





The cruise ship sitting in port in Seattle. They are monstrous vessels.

Our stateroom where we lived for 8 days.

Here's looking back from our balcony as we pulled out of port. I am leaning past our partition and didn't notice till tonight that I am such a good photographer that I caught our neighbor's belly in the picture!

Skyline of Seattle.

Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau.

The train in Skagway that we didn't take. There were waterfalls everywhere.

This bear ran in front of our bus on the road to the Yukon. We stopped and watched him eat on the side of the road. That was our only wildlife sighting other than the whales and a bald eagle that flew ten feet off our balcony.

Calving at Glacier Bay.

This was my quarantine day while we were cruising Glacier Bay. Long story. Just a warning - don't EVER, EVER ask for Imodium on a cruise ship unless you are on death's doorstep.

Glacier Bay. These pictures don't show how expansive everything is. Kind of like the sky in Montana. The landscape is just larger than life in Alaska.

Can you see the whale's tail? Probably only if the picture is as big as your screen. We saw them all afternoon coming out of Glacier Bay. The only one I saw completely come out of the water was when I didn't have my camera, just the binoculars. We got up at 6 one morning and froze sitting at the front of the boat to try to see some whales and we saw tons more on a clear and sunny afternoon.

We did not do our homework for this trip. We were so busy before we left and didn't even think to see where there were going to be lighthouses. The day before we ended the cruise we thought to ask. We caught this one just in time and then the next was just as we came into Victoria. I don't know how many we passed that we didn't know about!!

What a beautiful trip and how lucky we were to be able to go and see that part of the country and a tiny bit of Canada. Here's to 30 more years of marriage!

Alaska

First things first. Picture alert. Lots of pictures. (Description for above is below. I hate when I accidentally delete it.) Got this out of order. In Juneau this was an old train that used to remove snow from the tracks. Would drill through the snow and ice and then blow it away from the tracks.

This is how July started out. I got to go to Girls' Camp! They were all dressed up for their skit! I had a great time and the girls were great.

Our first formal evening on the ship. Bret and Terrie Runolfson are from Cottonwood, California. Bret and Scott were good friends growing up and I knew Terrie from junior high.

Our first stop was Juneau. We took a bus to Mendenhall Glacier (in the background). The salmon were just starting to run. They said that the rivers will get so full of salmon that you can walk across the salmon and then everything stinks very badly when they start to decompose.

A sideways picture of some ice off the glacier.

Mendenhall Glacier. This was the only rainy day we had so all the pictures look misty. We really lucked out with the weather.

The waterfall right next to Mendenhall Glacier. This doesn't show how large and powerful that thing was.

I was trying to show how big the waterfall was. It was very windy at the bottom of the waterfall.

Our ship on the left. A small boat on the right. I got such a kick out of the personal boats. They looked like remote control boats.

We met some pretty famous people there.

We had a full day in Skagway. We took a small bus up to the Yukon Territory border. This was one of the lakes on the way. The scenery on the whole trip was spectacular and my favorite part. These pictures don't do it justice.

Here's the border. We had been told by some to take the train, others had said not to. We opted to take the bus. It went up and back on the same road (further than the train goes), the train makes a loop. But the bus would stop for pictures. I'm not sure that the train did. We need to compare with someone who took the train to see if we missed out on something.

This was an afternoon of cruising in Glacier Bay. The glacier (a sideways picture, how do you rotate these things?) was not as big as I had pictured in my mind. We saw a few pieces calving (falling off), nothing huge. But the whole time you could hear what sounded like thunder because pieces were falling inside and behind it.

Glacier Bay. Again these pictures don't do it justice.

Ketchikan (picture at the top), where we spent a morning. It's a very small town of about 2800 people. A few ships can dock at the same time thereby doubling and tripling the size of the town.

A lumberjack show in Ketchikan. Can you say tourist trap? But it was a fun hour or so and those guys are really good at what they do.

The last stop was Victoria, B.C. We grabbed a cab and went to Butchart Gardens. That was more than I expected. Incredible. It was originally a gravel pit and the wife wanted to make something nice from it. The Victoria Symphony was doing an outdoor concert while we were there. It was fun to walk to Star Wars and other movie tunes.

A view into Butchart Bay from the gardens.

More pictures to come.

Summertime ... and the livin' is easy

This was supposed to be at the end. This is us today at the Gorge Visitor's Center. More about that below.

Brock and I took off for the weekend, helped Mom do a little packing and then headed to Bear Lake. On the way we saw some construction and wound our way in Brigham City up to the new temple! It is beautiful!

This was on the way down Logan Canyon into Bear Lake.

Hmmm. This was our motel at Ideal Beach. Brad had warned me that it wasn't much but I said if it was clean, that's all that mattered. The inside has been remodeled and it was quite nice. Everyone up there treated us wonderfully.

This is Brad's view every day. This is the beach right outside the motel and on the resort. Actually this is the bad beach and the good beach is under water. I didn't get pictures of cabana boys Josh and Brad. What a great summer job!

Bryce and Alicia came out for the holiday weekend and we headed up to Dutch John for independence day festivities. After stopping at the car show at Flaming Gorge Resort we headed to the dam to check it out. Ever since I saw the water being released from the dam on Channel 5 news some weeks ago I have wanted to get up there. It was an incredible site. Those are cars parked above the pipes to give you an idea how big they are. There is a video at the end of the post but it didn't work when I tried it. It is a crazy amount of water.

Then as we walked back to the car the rain started slowly, then very hard and just before we got to the car it started to hail. We were going to find a place to fish but it rained some more. The water is so high that the beach we had played on many years ago when my family all came up to the Gorge was no longer there. The water was up to the grass area. So we didn't wait around for the bbq and the fireworks in Dutch John, but headed back to the scrumptious Golden Corral. Oh well, it was a beautiful day anyway.

Blooming cactus at Antelope Flat? at the Gorge.