Ahhhlaska

I am now back from our Alaskan cruise adventure, which was indeed an adventure owing to the fact that I got sick the night before we left for Seattle. The one week I actually had plans I got bronchitis. As a result I spent a lot of time coughing (things up) and ended up losing my voice for a bit. It was fun times. But, on to the pictures!

Here's Optimistic. outside our boat (the Sapphire Princess) in Seattle. You can tell from the fierceness of his gaze that he is impatient to get to the cruising already. Why? Because there is food on the boat!

Lobstee, no! You are not really food! You have too much to live for! Eventually I talked him down, and before we knew it we were off the boat and in Ketchikan, the salmon capital of the world.

Here are all the siblings in Eagle park doing their best to look majestic/eagle-like. Most of them failed so we moved on to look at the gift shops where we had the pleasure of running into Sarah Palin.

This was a dream come true for Optimistic., but due to a restraining order filed by Ms. Palin earlier this year, he was forced to don a disguise so as to admire her up close.

Ah yes, she'll never recognize him now! After Ketchikan we went through Tracy Arm, which I'm told was beautiful but I chose to sleep through. Here's a picture Optimistic. took from the top deck.

After that it was on to Juneau where we ventured out into the rain to board a tour bus whose windows were so fogged up we couldn't really see anything.

But we trundled along and the driver gave us the scoop on the history of Juneau and after an enjoyable ride we arrived at the Mendenhall Glacier.

Yes, it's blue, and if you had sat through the movie at the Visitor's center twice like I did you'd know why. The big thrill of the visit was getting to touch a 250 year old piece of ice.

As a bonus I've included this guy who works at the visitor's center. Cool, right? Once Lobstee saw the ice there was no keeping him from it.

I had a lot of trouble keeping him from climbing into all the displays. He's full of mischief like that. Here he is crawling around in a bear's mouth. He has no fear that lobster.

Optimistic. was just as bad, as evidenced by the following picture in which he is shaking hands with a goat. They're ripe for blackmail, the both of them.

Our next stop was Skagway. Optimistic. was off zip-lining so I went to the Skagway Museum and poked around.

There were a lot of interesting artifacts on display from the time of the town's founding and I would have stayed longer if Lobstee hadn't managed to get us thrown out. Something about illegal gambling combined with the use of flash photography.

I say putting a roulette wheel out in the open like that is asking for trouble. Either way I was back on the boat before I knew it.

The next leg of our journey meant a few days on board as we headed for Canada, so we had a lot of time to hang out together. This entailed eating a lot of food and playing a lot of cards.

Check out this excellent hand. Several movies on TV later we arrived in Victoria, constituting my first trip out of the country.

We walked around, saw the sights, and spent a chunk of Canadian money on souvenirs.

And that was the end of the cruise. But unfortunately not the end of our trip. After we disembarked in Seattle we spent sixteen hours driving back to Provo in a gigantic SUV that ended up running out of gas 25 miles outside of La Grande. But that's a whole different story involving a tow truck driver, Weird Al, and talk of eel smuggling.