Cruise to Alaska Day 06: Hubbard Glacier

Although this day was an "at-sea" day, its highlight was to be over two hours spent at rest directly in front of the Hubbard Glacier, an extraordinarily active glacier that meets the ocean in an out-of-the way inlet. There's no road access to it, so it was a treat to be able to see it via the cruise ship.

But first, breakfast!

You will notice, I fear, that although I am still eating a large portion of healthy fresh produce, I have had to put that produce on a second plate to make way for my Official Breakfast Boyfriend of bacon, sauteed mushrooms, roasted tomato, and chocolate croissant. I have been working out extra hard since we got back, but it was worth it, my Buttery Chocolate Lover!

When we were finished, we FINALLY got to attend a presentation by our shipboard lecturer, Dr. John Kessler. His three lectures were scheduled for the final three days of our nine-day cruise, and after a while, every time I saw him, I was basically like, "OMG, when are you going to teach me something?!?"

I really like my learning!

John's lecture was, of course, freaking epic. He's an oceanographer whose interest is in the chemistry of the ocean; basically, as he tells it, he treats the entire ocean as a giant reacting flask, taking samples and studying the chemical processes that occur. He studies, in particular, the ways that biochemical reactions in seawater can create or dissipate greenhouse gasses. We learned about carbon reserves locked in the Alaskan permafrost, and methane hydrate fields that contain almost two times as much carbon as all current fossil fuels combined.

If you're an academic, you know that one of the things that you do when a fellow academic bro speaks is make damn sure that you've got some emergency questions to ask them. A lecturer's nightmare is to finish a presentation, ask, "Any questions?", and hear crickets. The only time that nobody has questions is if nobody paid attention. So just in case, you prep your own questions during their lecture--not softball ones, and just a couple, just enough so that you've got a back-and-forth and there aren't any crickets and the rest of the audience knows that *somebody* was riveted by that amazing lecture!

Anyway, you'll also know, then, that it's a testament to how seriously awesome John's lecture was that, like, everybody had a billion really cool questions for him afterwards. Like really. I had no idea that I was interested in the chemistry of the ocean, and now I'm all, "Dude, I wonder what's the melting point to warm up a methane hydrate field to release its methane?" Ooh, and does the methane have a liquid state, or does it go straight from solid to gas in the ocean?

I'm telling you--the chemistry of the ocean. Look it up.

Okay, and now that I've told you all the things about this really interesting lecture that I went to, here's a beautiful glacier to look at!

We passed through an ice field to get to the glacier, and it was studded with these gorgeous, huge icebergs. I did not over-saturate this image in post-processing--this is what this iceberg really looked like! So many colors of blue!

 Here's a view of the cruise ship kicking through that ice field:



And here's the Hubbard Glacier!

I couldn't even get the entire glacier in the camera frame, we were so close.

See all those different colors of blue and grey, and all the layers of dirt and rock and sediment? It's hard to believe that you're looking at four stories of glacier up there, and who knows how much below!

Hubbard Glacier is extremely active, and we were able to see it calve numerous times.

 If you listen carefully in the videos, you can hear thunderclaps every now and then. That's the sound of the glacier calving!

Although mostly we're all running around all over, the Hubbard Glacier proved to be a handy spontaneous meeting spot, and it turned into a party with a beautiful backdrop.

This is my favorite picture of us on our vacation, although as soon as she'd snapped it, a shipboard acquaintance who was taking it said, "Okay, now let's get one that's not silly."

We stayed on deck for the entire time that we were near the glacier, just soaking it in. You have to look at it with naked eyes to understand how big it is, but when you look at it through binoculars, you can take in all the intricate details that make it up.

We warmed up with wine and DVDs in our cabin for much of the rest of the afternoon, but that evening, we had a dinner with the other members of our university alumni travel group. One of the unanticipated pleasures of being without the kids in a space where everyone is without their kids is how the conversations don't revolve around kids! I now know more than I did about black bears and the Seattle Public Library, and I know what restaurant I'm going to eat dinner at the next time that I'm in Columbus, Indiana.

I also did not realize how long a single dinner can take when you're in a nice restaurant. Thanks to several courses (including my first beef tartare--I rate it "eh") and excellent conversation, dinner took something like THREE HOURS. We were barely in time to catch our cruise buddy Tim's piano concert!

Excuse the crappy quality of the photo, but it was really dark in there and I'd had some wine. Or champagne. Can't remember, but it was good, and the concert was amazing!

Not pictured: the IU flag that was hung on the ship in our honor that day, Matt's crouching death grip on the rails of Deck 10 because he's afraid of heights (which both amused people and made them feel sorry for him), the champagne that we were given and how Matt didn't knock out a lightbulb (this time) when he opened it, or my dinner, although I super wanted to take a picture of my beef tartare because it looked like dog food served in one of those Fancy Feast goblets.

Cruise to Alaska Day 05: Juneau

Fair warning: this day was AMAZING, and you're probably going to be as exhausted after reading about it as I was after living it.

Life is tough, yo!

Our view from breakfast--insert happy sigh.

I SUPER wanted to take this cable car up to the top of the mountain, but wasn't mean enough to so much as mention it to Matt. He would never have made it up with his sanity intact.

 Anyway, we had a pressing date with Juneau Whale Tours, on account of we wanted to see...

WHALES!!!!11!!!!!!!

The scenery was really beautiful, too. See that glacier?

This pod of humpback whales was happily bubble net feeding, and so we were able to follow and observe them for the entire time.

Thanks to our shipboard naturalist's lecture on cetacean identification a couple of days prior, we were able to recognize the spouting as that of humpbacks (seriously, I have diagrams of spouts and copious notes in my travel journal), as well as their distinctive dorsal fins, humpbacks, and flukes.

You can see their dorsal fins and humpbacks well in this video, as well as hear the sound of their spouting:

The seagulls will also tell you where the whales are bubble net fishing.

You can identify individual humpbacks by the markings on their tail flukes.

 Even when we finally left the whales, the scenery was still beautiful, as we passed more glaciers in the distance, and the captain stopped to let us check out these sea lions on a buoy:

As sea lions do, they fought:



Whale watching is awesome enough to fill up one day, you might think, but this is ALASKA, where awesome is everywhere, all the time, so after whale watching, we went to check out Mendenhall Glacier!

This particular glacier is retreating very quickly, so we're lucky to have seen it while it's still around.

We also saw this little fellow, a first for me. Can you tell what it is?

 It's. A. PORCUPINE!!!

Here's the glacier up close, so you can see some detail.

And a little closer...

And now from far away, so you can see Nugget Falls to the right of it. We hiked over to Nugget Falls!

A tour guide had told us the story earlier on this day of Romeo, a wolf who preferred hanging around town to being with a wolf pack. He was sadly shot one day, but not before he'd apparently impregnated every female dog in Juneau, and THAT'S why I kept seeing wolfdogs around! I'd thought it was just some crazy Alaskan hipster trend!

The falls might not seem so big...

...until you get some perspective. This is my favorite photo of myself from this entire trip, me squatting in front of a glacier and a waterfall, feeling if the water is cold (it is!) and looking for interesting rocks.

Fine, I like this photo, too.

And this photo of us together, although it's really embarrassing when we try to take selfies, on account of we're SOOOO bad at it. Seriously, senior citizens have an easier time taking selfies than we do.

I don't know why I didn't get any good photos of Matt by himself! Here he is looking through the binoculars, though, so you know that he was at least present.

It's a shame, I suppose, that we're not into taking cheezy portraits together.

 Even after whale watching AND glacier spying, we still hiked around the town of Juneau for a while, because I had a burning desire to see the state capitol building.

Ummm.... this is it. Yay?

Finally, however, we trekked back to the ship, squeaking our way in just before all-aboard.

On deck five, our room usually has a gorgeous view, but it's also just below the level of the pier whenever we dock, so on port days we always have some sort of weird view like this.

We still had drinks and dinner and various shipboard activities ahead, but oh, my goodness, I was SO glad to get back to our room that night and see one of my favorite cruise ship sites:

Yep, that's our bed, with the sheets and blankets nicely turned down for us, the schedule of the next day's activities left at the foot, and honest-to-god chocolates on top. I LOVED this vacation!

Not pictured: any of the bald eagles that we saw, because I was too busy taking photos of whales, any of the stoplights in Juneau, because there weren't any, any of our friends, although I assure you that we're not the only people on this cruise, or either of the TWO chocolate croissants that I ate with breakfast, because one must keep up one's strength, mustn't one?

Cruise to Alaska Day 04: Wrangell

What do you do when your time zones are so off (FOUR hours at this point!) that you wake up starving an hour before breakfast begins?

You send your husband to the coffee bar to bring back coffee, pastries, and jam, and you finish watching Captain America in bed while you enjoy them!

We didn't have any organized excursions booked at this port, so here's what we chose to do!

We hiked Mt. Dewey, whose claim to fame is that John Muir once hiked here and built an interesting campfire at the top. Side note: when the kids got home and we were telling each other about our vacations, I told them about this and they both immediately shouted, "MUIR WOODS!", and then told me all about John Muir and their very interesting trip to Muir Woods! Yay for context! Mental note: show kids the Ken Burns National Parks series.

The hike is pretty steep and also, don't fall off of the boardwalk!

Matt wasn't always so sure about the height, but he was a trooper about it.

The views, of course, were worth it. You can see our cruise ship from here, as well.

Here's more of those trees on elevated roots that I was telling you about in Ketchikan.

And some more!

After we hiked down from Mt. Dewey, we hiked to Petroglyph Beach. 

The petroglyphs here aren't nearly as well-maintained as they were in Hawaii, but that made hunting for them more of an adventure.

Even though we did sometimes find them cracked.

Or buried in sand!

This is almost my favorite photo from the entire trip. It also seems to be kind of a thing in Alaska to leave your boat to rot wherever you're done with it.

This one is so much more elaborate than the others that I'm not sure that it's from the same time period.

Many petroglyph designs are unique to this area.

But many, bafflingly, are not. Do you recognize these circles?!? In Hawaii, the prevailing theory that we were told is that they marked births, with the indentation in the middle meant to hold a segment of umbilical cord, and the additional rings meant to represent additional births. In Alaska, however, we were told that historians don't know what these represent. Weird, right?

 After we'd hiked what seemed like all damn day, we got back to the ship and it turns out that not only was the day still going strong, after all, but that it was plenty warm enough to hop into our swimsuits and spend the rest of the afternoon at the pool.

And the lounge chairs. And the milkshake bar...

 Not pictured: the kid whom I bought a garnet from and whose friend gave us free lemonade; the shoes that I also bought, after finally admitting that the boots that I've owned for nigh upon a decade have grown maybe half a size too small; the friends that we've made (including one at the top of Mt. Dewey!), because it's easy to make friends on a cruise; or any part of the evening, probably because it began with another reception for our group that included free wine.

Cruise to Alaska Day 03: Ketchikan

This was our first port day and one of our longest port days, with both our first excursion and a ton of free time in one of the loveliest towns in Alaska, so excuse the shocking number of photos and videos that I am about to subject you to:

Can you have a better breakfast than one eaten on the back-end of a cruise ship at sea? Don't be fooled by the fact that half my plate is fresh produce--I gained something like five pounds on this vacation! But as hard as I've been working out since I've gotten home, I would not trade in a single chocolate croissant or heaping serving of bacon. That food was amazing!

It tasted even better with this view.

We passed through this fog on the way to Ketchikan, but most of our port days were sunny and clear and warm.

Our first excursion was canoeing around a lake in Tongass National Forest. Although I can swim, I am not confident in or on the water, so I love myself some life jackets!

Matt is confident in and on the water, and when he canoes, his forearms look hot.

See the dead tree at the bottom of the frame, with the little seedlings growing in the lichen on top of it? That's how these trees grow

The dead tree then rots out from underneath them, so the mature trees have these roots that look like spiderlegs.

This fungus is called bear bread. Bears eat it just prior to hibernation to constipate them.

Early in the spring, then, they eat this skunk cabbage, to get their bowels moving again. If you eat it, it will give you, too, diarrhea, but if you simply wrap your salmon in it to bake, it will give the salmon a nice mustardy flavor.

I am pretty proud of myself that I'm canoeing and not dying. This vacation and all its water activities was a huge confidence booster for me!

It was a big canoe, with several people per side, except that I kept looking behind me and noticing that I was the only one paddling on my side--humph!

Since this is a National Forest, not a National Park, some parts of it are logged, but not this area. It's original, pristine forest here.

I survived the canoe trip!

Now on to explore Ketchikan!

Whales are so common that they're used in advertising!

Also salmon.

Yes, I did take pictures of all of the totem poles.

This totem pole makes me sad to look at now, though, because it was underneath this totem pole that we phoned Will to wish her a Happy Birthday. We were only able to leave her a voicemail, and I cried. Oh, my gosh, I missed the kids SO MUCH on this vacation!

Super tall totem pole!

Creek Street is now a boardwalk of indie shops over a salmon creek, but it used to be a red light district. This shirt is also an example of the work of the artist Ray Troll, whom we fell in love with on this vacation. He lives in Ketchikan (although his work is apparently seen all over the world), and we bought several prints of his while we were here. Now that we're home, I'm going to go online and buy another T-shirt of his that I wanted but didn't get at the time.

Here's the creek.

And here's how the gentlemen could get there!

 As Matt and I were walking along this creek, he suddenly exclaimed, "Ooh, I see a salmon!"

"Nuh-uh," I said, because I have that kind of positive attitude.

Nevertheless, I looked, and didn't see any salmon, and looked, and didn't see any salmon, and looked, and didn't see any salmon, and looked, and then--I saw a salmon! And then another! And another!

It turns out that the creek was absolutely teeming with salmon!

Can you see them?

 They're actually easier to see on video:



But these guys, resting a bit before the tide rises enough for them to be able to make it up these rapids, are a little easier to spot:

Yeah, we possibly hung out watching salmon for hours before remembering the time and hiking back to the ship.

Found another totem pole on the way there, because of course.

And our cruise ship!

Not pictured: Soho Coho, our favorite shop in all of Alaska, the random tourist with whom I fangirled over salmon at the Salmon Ladder, any of the beautiful stained glass pieces that decorated the light posts along the dock, or the very instructive lecture on cetaceans that we attended and that taught me exactly how to positively identify the humpback whales that we're going to see in a couple of days!