Farewell, Alaska! Glacier Edition

I feel perpetually behind on blogging right now!  Mostly because our last weeks in Alaska were kind of a blur, due to Mike sailing with me and then the Alaska end-of-season clearance sales.  As a quick update, we’re actually in Vancouver today (my first time here), getting a feel for the city and heavy amounts of Starbucks WiFi before we sail today for Los Angeles and the second “half” of our cruise life: Mexico and Hawaii!

I won’t be blogging about my last week in Alaska, because I literally didn’t do anything except check the stores for clearance sales.  And we had rain all week, to make up for all the sun we’d had the week before.  In fact, Mike got the best weather we had all season in Alaska: ALL SUNNY DAYS.  I don’t know how he managed that.

But what did I do when Mike was on the boat with me?

Well, the week started out phenomenally, with this extraordinary Star Wars costume exhibit at the EMP Museum in Seattle.  Seriously, he picked me up from church in his cab from the airport and we immediately went to the museum.  What a way to say, “Hi honey, I’ve missed you!”, right?  But it was actually the perfect choice.  We’re huge Star Wars nerds (also LOTR nerds), and it was great neutral ground to reconnect after not seeing each other for over three months.

We checked out some of the other exhibits at the museum, notably the Indie Gaming exhibit and the Fantasy exhibit, but I was so busy snapchatting photos from the Fantasy exhibit to my sister (who’s teaching a Worldbuilding class to her middle schoolers this fall!) that I neglected to take photos.

Our sea days weren’t very exciting, I must say.  Lots of watching episodes of The Love Boat (so endearing after awhile) and Mike finally seeing my shows.  I also took advantage of having a great voice teacher on board to get tuned up vocally.  It was very unnerving to go without a voice lesson for three months while singing almost every day, so I was super grateful for Mike’s advice and input.  I feel a lot more confident about the work I’m doing now that I’ve gotten his blessing, hehe.

In Ketchikan, the weather was gorgeous, so we went hiking up my favorite trail, the one I had hiked three times before.  Here’s the one shot we took at the top.  I don’t like to pull out my camera when hiking – too involved in breathing in the fresh air and wet dirt smells.  But it was nice to share my favorite Alaskan hiking trail with Mike.

Here are a couple shots I got between the two trips, but for a lot of great, professional-quality photos that capture what the ice caves felt like (and are even better than we saw), check out this article: “Go Hike the Mendenhall Ice Cave Before It Melts”.  It also gives you a nice perspective on how fast the glaciers are melting.

I rest my case.

Once we got up to the Meade Glacier, though, it was cool.  Literally – the temperature was about twenty degrees colder than down in Skagway, even with the copious sunshine, since there was a brisk wind whipping through the mountains.  Mike and I hadn’t been sure we would get an excursion that day, so we hadn’t bundled up sufficiently.  Brrrrr!

This is a short river to a huge waterfall at the far end. An amazing amount of water!

And by then, the trip was almost over.  In Victoria we just walked around the beach and the town, grabbing candy apples for dessert and trying not to think about saying goodbye the next morning.  It was much harder than we had anticipated, even though we consider ourselves somewhat proficient at long distance.  But he’s planning to be back in November, so it’s wonderful to have that to look forward to now.

As I mentioned, today I’m in Vancouver, and here are a couple shots from my wanderings this morning.  It may be a little while till I blog again, because we’re heading to Los Angeles, and then my mom is sailing with me for five days.  But I’ll see you soon!

Though I am an employee of Princess Cruises, all opinions are mine only and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

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