Alaska Cruise

Ok, so I'm finally posting about our Alaska Cruise! We had such a fun trip. We drove to Washington with Karen's mom and spent a night at my folks' place. Vivian drove us to Seattle the next day where we picked up Karen's Aunt Hanae. We boarded the Zaandam (Holland America Lines) and headed North to Alaska! So here are some of my favorites of the 2000 photos (thank goodness for digital cameras....)

This is the main pool on the Lido Deck. The glass top slides shut when it's cold and windy. We pulled out of Seattle about 5:30 pm.

We spent the entire next day at sea, traveling to Juneau, Alaska. Here is our stateroom.

This is Karen's mom and Aunt Hanae at our first formal dinner.

And Karen and I on our first formal night.

Here is our Juneau pilot getting ready to board the ship.

The helicopter ride to the glacier was awesome. We flew over about four glaciers on our way.

This one was called Suicide Glacier. See it jumping off the cliff?

This is the helicopter we rode in. We spent about an hour walking around on Mendenhall Glacier.

And this is us. They dressed us in warm coats, pants, gloves, boots, gators and cramp-ons. Also fanny packs with water bottles and granola bars, and walking sticks.





We spent the entire next day cruising in Glacier Bay National Park. We saw a little fuzzy brown spot on shore that they claimed was a brown bear (not pictured here.)

And we saw thousands of little icebergs.


We stopped and watched Margorie Glacier for an hour or so and even saw a few big chunks of ice fall into the water (not pictured here--they are really hard to get a good picture of.)


We passed by several glaciers that day. On the way out we saw people standing at the base of Lamplugh Glacier (see the little specs at the bottom right?)

We also saw lots of whales, sea otters, seals, puffins, porpoises, and many other critters today.

The next morning we passed by Mt. Edgecomb (dormant volcano) on our way into Sitka.

And a whole bunch of fishing boats.

The weather was beautiful and so was the scenery.


We saw a lot of bald eagles.

And some more brown bears.

And had fun paddling around in the sea kayaks.

This is our ship, the M.S. Zaandam.

This is a totem pole in Sitka.

The next day we traveled to Ketchikan. I spent a lot of time watching the world go by from the Crow's Nest.

Here is a picture of Creek Street.

I like this picture of Ketchikan because the big buildings look so small from the top deck of our cruise ship.

After another day at sea, we finally arrived in time for an evening visit to the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC.

We arrived back in Seattle the next morning where Viv and Janice met us at the dock (more about that later.)