Alaska Vacation

Sue and I had a wonderful cruise to Alaska. We left Saturday August 9th with Steven driving us to the airport. Our plane was about 1 ½ hours late due to a runway in Seattle being closed down. Nevertheless, we got to Seattle and had no difficulty finding the Princess employees and getting on the bus. After a 20 minute drive, the Golden Princess was waiting for us. We left Seattle about 5pm and cruised all day Sunday.

Alaska is just beautiful with mountains covered in snow and glaciers. We arrived in Juneau and took an excursion to the Mendenhaul Glacier. As we got off the bus one lady start to barf. That was disturbing. The glacier was real nice and at that site was a small stream where the salmon were spawning. I won't show a salmon picture without their signed consent, besides they like their privacy. After we returned we roamed the town for a short while.

This was Monday and it was our 29th wedding anniversary. 29 years of total happiness. To celebrate we had dinner at the ship's specialty steakhouse. Good thing because that was the day the dining rooms had a bad menu option. Most of the time we ate breakfast and lunch at the buffet and dinner in the dining room. Food was great. One day Sue actually tried some cavier. This picture shows how well she liked it.



The ship's entertainment, well what can I say, it was a cruise ship. We had seen most of the acts before on other cruises so it was disappointing. At least the singers this time were on pitch. Tuesday we were in Skagway. We had a wonderful excursion, a bus ride into the Yukon and a ride on the White Pass train back. The Yukon is so beautiful. This first picture I will enter in Princess's photo contest.

Sue has a new friend.

I like this picture from "The small boat harbor". I wonder what the large boats are like.

Wednesday we crused the Tracy Arm thingie, a deep canyon carved by a glacier. There were icebergs everywhere with the most incredible color blue. Glaciers and waterfalls landscaped the 3,000 foot granite cliffs. This was the only place it was actually cold. It was cloudy almost every day with light sprinkles.

The last picture is the glacier that carved the entire canyon over the last 10,000+ years. The next day we were at Ketchikan where we did our shopping for family. Rebecca was the big winner. Then we left about noon and sailed all the next day arriving at Victoria about 7pm. We were there for a few hours and left about midnight. We did not even get off the ship since there was nothing to do at the stop, especially late at night, so we enjoyed watching most of the people leave the ship and slowly walk back five minutes later.

To me, here is the most beautiful woman in the world, my bride of 29 years.

As fate would have it, the Golden Princess is the same ship we were on in January for Brenda's wedding. Brenda told me to eat a hot dog for her. Here you go Bren.

This last picture is of the two of us exercising on the ship. 4 laps around is a mile. Thanks Steven for taking care of the house and Katy for picking us up at the Flyaway.