Photos

Slowly but surely I'm weeding through my 1500 pictures from the trip (plus Beth's 500, plus Dad's ?? with 2 cameras and a video camera). I'm going to break them up into smaller albums so they're more manageable.

I'll post the links to the albums here as I get them uploaded. Let me know if the links don't work:

Vancouver

Inside Passage (Cruise) - updated link 7.21 - sorry it didn't work before

Alaska by land (Kenai, Denali and Juneau/Erin)

Beth's "Best Of" Album

Dad fixed the corrupt chip! Yay!

Here are a few pictures that didn't make any of the above albums

Getting Ready to Zip in Ketchikan

Hi Erin!!

Being tourists in Juneau - Erin is embarrassed of us :)
At Glacier Gardens - overlooking Gastineau Channel in Juneau

Back in Chicago

After a long but relatively painless travel day, we're back safe and sound in Chicago. The endless blue skies and warmth are a great change of pace from 50s and cloudy for the last 3 weeks. I'm sure the 90s will feel sweltering tomorrow.

All in all, a great trip to Alaska. The entire state is gorgeous, from cruising up the Inside Passage (with NO bad scenery), to the Kenai Peninsula, and up to Denali. Anchorage is really the only place I wouldn't want to return.

The cruise companies have really taken over a lot of the tourism of the state (the only place we didn't really encounter them were on the Kenai, but even saw one tour group in Homer), but once you get beyond the ubiquitous jewelry shops and tour buses, they don't ruin the experience. Cruise passengers are a friendly group, so you get lots of people offering to take your group pictures.

Thanks for reading our blog and keeping up on our journey across the 49th state. Looking forward to seeing the Chicago area readers soon!

$5.00+ gas

On the Kenai about a week ago, I saw my first $5.00+/gal regular unleaded gas. Even though the oil comes from Alaska, they don't have a refinery, so gas is very expensive up here (they send it down to the lower 48 to refine, and then it comes back up - lots of traveling costs).

Then, a few days later, I found myself paying $5.37/gal for 2 gallons of gas in Denali (I put in the bare minimum to get me to the next small town, where I added a few more gallons for the bargain rate of $4.96/gallon).

YIKES!

Just for the halibut

For everyone wondering if I'd eat any seafood while in Alaska (knowing of my distrust of sea creatures becoming my dinner), I've eaten (and enjoyed) many kinds of seafood while in Alaska:

Halibut
King crab
Steamer clams
Kachemak Bay oysters
Smoked salmon mousse

The rest of my family also enjoyed the fresh salmon (many varieties, depending on what was running), dungeness crab, black cod, and other north pacific fish I can't remember the names of.

When in rome....

Hiking Mt. Roberts

Today, Erin took us on a hike up Mt. Roberts, where most people travel up via tram. We rode down the tram, after doing the hard part by foot. I was just happy that we didn't encounter any bears or moose on the trail :) I think we climbed up about 1,700 feet, if I'm remembering the elevation correctly. I was definitely tired at the end, as I'm not used to hiking mountains in Chicago, but the view was beautiful from the top (even with the clouds).

Johanna - this following picture is for you - our reenactment of your trip on the tram in Capetown as we rode down the Juneau tram. :)



We also visited the beautiful Mendenhall Glacier. This is the most accessible glacier in Alaska, so it gets a lot of visitors. It's amazing to see the photos and lines of where the glacier was just 20 years ago, and how much it's receding (more than 500 feet per year). They even had a cool time lapse video that showed the glacier actually moving downhill throughout the course of last year, but enough calving at the head of the glacier to cause the recession (rather than an advancement).

The day finished up with a delicious Filopino dinner with Erin & her roommates, who were all very sweet and fun to talk with.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a glacier!

Today saw the Polichs reach The End of the Road, a sacred shrine, a brewery (no, those aren't the same thing), and the top of a glacier. Whew!

Yesterday, before Beth and I arrived, Mom, Dad and Erin visited 3 of the 4 ends of the road (you can't drive in or out of Juneau, so the road extends about 40 miles north/south, and 16 miles along the parallel Douglas Island road. Today, we went to where the Juneauans call "the end of the road." So strange to live in a place that you can't drive anywhere. (Juneau is hemmed in by extreme avalanche danger, major steep cliffs/mountains along the ocean, and a gigantic ice field). At the end of this road, we visited a nice beach, where people were fishing and others learning to kayak. The no-see-um bugs chased us out after Dad and Erin spent some time skipping rocks.

We then visited one of Erin's favorite places in Juneau - the Shrine of St. Therese. This shrine is beautifully situated along the ocean, out on a little spit of land, and it has a sereneness about it that lends to its sacred qualities. We watched fish jumping out of the surrounding bay, and Dad even spotted a seal swimming around. Erin took me on a journey through the rock labyrinth, to the great entertainment of some other visitors to the shrine.

Back to Juneau to eat some crab - crab bisque, alaskan king crab, and dungeness crab. The bisque was very tasty, and I liked the king crab better than the dungeness (I think everyone else agreed).

We headed over to the Alaskan Brewery for a tour of the premises and some free samples. We've enjoyed many Alaskan brews while visiting (and Erin has throughout her year here), so it was fun to hear the history and how the brewery has grown in the last 20 years. It's now the 20th largest brewery in the country, and its sales extend up and down the western seaboard (if you live in the West, I highly recommend giving Alaskan Brewery beers a try- we've really liked all of the varieties we've tried).

The beer was necessary, because afterwards we headed to a helicopter ride to one of the glaciers that comes off the gigantic ice field mentioned above. We put on special traction boots, loaded into the 6 passenger "bird", and headed over the Gastineau Channel to the Herbert Glacier, where we landed and walked around for about 15 minutes. Glaciers can appear blue, especially on cloudy days, as the ice absorbs all of the other colors but reflects back the blue spectrum. Being on the glacier highlighted exactly how blue some of the glacier can get! (I described the blue in one of the streams as the blue of a toilet bowl cleaner - that vibrant and bright). We were near the end of the glacier, so there were many caverns and peaks along the glacier. It was somewhat scary to be walking along (it's slippery ice, with incredibly deep crevasses), but also pretty damn cool.

We all agreed that the helicopter seemed less scary than the little Cesna we'd ridden in earlier (except Erin who didn't ride the Cesna but loved the helicopter anyway). Even though they're probably inherently more dangerous, the helicopter ride is very smooth and has a lot of manueverability.

Mom and Dad head back to Chicago tomorrow, and with them goes my internet access (logging on through Dad's laptop/hotel wifi). Beth and I follow on Tuesday, so I'll log on when I get home for our last trip updates. It's bittersweet that this trip is almost over - on one hand, I've loved our time in Alaska and want to spend more time with Erin, and on the other hand, I'm ready for some clean clothes and my own bed. Plus, Erin will be home in a month. And 50 degree cloudy weather is not my idea of summer! If only for the warmth alone, I'll be happy to be home.

Photos

I have a faster connection here, so I went back and uploaded a few pictures to the "tiny tiny plane" and "hubbard glacier" posts - go back and check them out if you have time!