Oh, by the way. We went to Alaska. It was fun.
The big ticket activities included:
- Taking the ferry from Homer to Kodiak
- A "flightseeing" tour around the peak of Mt. Denali (McKinley)
- A glacier cruise from Whittier to Blackstone Glacier in Prince William Sound
The small ticket activities (which are the ones that make a vacation) included:
- Barely avoiding rear-ending another car that stopped suddenly and having my annoyance/anger quickly terminated by the realization she stopped because of the beluga whales dining on salmon just 100 yards away.
- Being flexible enough to stay in "rustic" tent cabins while surrounded by people staying in $300 rooms.
- Spending a fair amount of time among large packs of geriatrics and seeing how, when in large packs they exhibit the same full range of personality types, behaviors, and misbehaviors as younger people. Really, it was kind like being on an anthropological tour.
- Two moose sightings, just to make GD jealous. One of them on the side of the road while (we were) driving.
- Turning every corner and having it be somehow more beautiful than the last.
- For the first time ever having falafal and liking it and the irony of doing so at the northernmost hummus stand on the continent. And all it cost me (beyond the $5) was a menacing stare from a librarian.
- Seeing the sandhill cranes and Canada geese gathered at the
other end preparing for the migration south. I asked that they skip California this year and not **** on our sidewalks but I expect they'll ignore me.
- Muklukland even though we didn't have time to stop for it. It just makes life better knowing it exists.
- Watching Lani's reaction to seeing for her first time a salmon run in full go.
- A very large dead whale on a beach and the people fishing within yards of it considering I could smell the thing from 600 feet away.
- Bitching about how seeing dozens of businesses with the word "Sourdough" in the name has made me really want some and there must be great sourdough available though I'd never heard that before. And then learning what "sourdough" means in Alaska. (And I did eventually get some sourdough pancakes though they weren't all that great.)
Here is a panorama I made from our glacier cruise in Prince William Sound. Your browser will probably resize it to fit in your browser window but if you click on it you can scroll through it full size.