Alaska #7: Ketchikan

This will be my last Alaska post!  Our last port stop was Ketchikan, and it was a really fun stop.  We spent the day hanging out, and we started off our day by going to the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show, which was such a fun time!  It is AMAZING what those guys can do!!  They were really funny too, so we had a blast watching that.

After that, we went to lunch at Annabelle's Famous Keg & Chowder House, and it was delicious!  I'm not a big seafood fan and neither is my mom, but Kevin and my dad both had the chowder and loved it.

After lunch we wandered around the town a bit and then we picked up a Self-Guided Tour brochure from the Visitor's Center.  We followed the self-guided tour and checked out the cool river where a lot of salmon spawn, and we made our way over to the Totem Heritage Center!  They had some amazing totems. It was cool to see some of the really old totems, and to read this history of totems in Ketchikan.

After the Totem Heritage Center, we continued our self-guided tour and ended up in the Creek Street area!  There's tons of cool shops that carry stuff from local artists, and this is also home to the famous Dolly's House (it used to be a brothel). 

Our trip went by so fast!  Ketchikan was our last port, and the next day we were sailing all day, and then the next day we caught our flights back home!!  It was such a fun trip, and it was SO fun to get to experience this with my parents and Kevin!   We had so much fun at all of the ports, as well as on the ship when we were just hanging out, or when we were going to dinner on the ship! 

Alaska # 6: Icy Strait Point

Our next stop was Icy Strait Point!  I actually didn't take ANY pictures at this stop!  I don't know why... I was just busy enjoying it.  I really loved this stop! It's near the town of Hoonah, and it's Alaska Native owned-and-operated, and all of the profits from this stop directly support the community of Hoonah, which is Alaska's largest Native Tlingit village.  We were the only cruise ship there, so it was actually really quiet and peaceful!

Kevin and I signed up for some kayaking, which was AMAZING!!!!  It was so much fun.  I absolutely loved it, and it was beautiful and fun and peaceful, and we saw about a million bald eagles, and we also saw a bald eagle nest.  That was in the afternoon though, so in the morning we were able to spend a lot of time wandering around Icy Strait Point, and we checked out some of the shops which had a lot of locally-made items.

My dad signed up for the zipline at Icy Strait Point!  It's North America's longest and highest zipline. He LOVED it, and we were able to find my mom and be there when my dad finished up!  We went and grabbed a beer with him after that.  When we were walking out of the restaurant after our beers, this lady started yelling and pointing at the water so we all turned to look, and we saw SO many whales!!  It was amazing!!  I don't think any of us got pictures of it (we were all just amazed and we were staring at them watching them), but it was SO unbelievably cool.  Here's almost exactly what it looked like: 

This is what they looked like!  I think there were 4 of them though.  It was SO cool. 

And this is a pic I found online of the zipline at Icy Strait Point!  This is what my dad did! 

And here's a pic of the kayaks we were in!  They're the closed top kayaks, so that was really interesting!  And Kevin sat in the back and I sat in the front, so he did all the steering with the foot pedals. 

Such a fun day!!  It felt like we had the whole place to ourselves!  It was really quiet and beautiful. 

Alaska #5: Skagway

Our 2nd port was Skagway!  It was such a cute little town.  We had signed up for the White Pass Summit Railway expedition, and it was soooo cool!  We had the 8:15am train, and it was a lovely way to start the day!  We got to just sit there and relax and look at the amazing scenery, and learn about how they built this crazy railway!  Here are some pictures from the train! 

My handsome husband enjoying the scenery. 

My parents! 

My mom enjoying the scenery! 

An amazing bridge!  Part of it collapsed (the far side)

We made it to Canada! 

After the train ride (it was about 4 hours?), we wandered around Skagway!  We stopped by the Skagway Brewing Company for lunch, and it was great!  The food was so good, and the beer was great too!  My beer was brewed with some Spruce tips, and it tasted really interesting and delicious!  We did a bit of souvenir shopping, stopped in a few historic sites in the town, and just enjoyed wandering! 

This is a cool train that they use for plowing the crazy amounts of snow they get in the winter along the railway! 

Alaska #4: Juneau

Sorry for the delay in finishing my Alaska posts!  Life has been crazy busy since we got back.  So, back to Alaska:

Our first port stop was Juneau!  We were so excited!!  My parents spent the day exploring the city of Juneau, but Kevin and I had signed up with a tour company called ABAK to go explore Mendenhall Glacier!  If you're going to Juneau, I TOTALLY recommend ABAK!!  They have a bunch of options, but the one we signed up for was a canoe trip over to the glacier, and then hiking around on the glacier!  The canoe trip was one hour each way, so that's a lot of paddling! Our arms were pretty tired by the end of the day, but it was a really beautiful way to approach a glacier!  There were 6 of us on the tour, so that was the perfect number!  It was enough people to help paddle the canoe, but a low enough company that it still felt like a personal tour. 

Mendenhall Glacier!!  

Our tour guide telling us about the glacier, and showing us where the glacier was the year prior, and years prior to that. 

 When we got to the glacier, we put on our crampons (these metal spikes that hook onto your boots) and got our helmets and harnesses on, and then we were ready to start exploring the glacier!  Our tour guide was AMAZING, and she was able to scope out some of the best areas of the glacier for us to explore, and was able to explain all of the cool formations.  We were also able to see the drastic levels of glacier melt that have been going on over recent years, and we learned that the AMAZING blue ice caves that you've probably seen pictures of before (just Google it if you haven't seen pictures - they're beautiful) have completely melted and disappeared over the past year or so.  So, no more ice caves at the Mendenhall Glacier!  It's so sad.  Seriously, watch the movie "Chasing Ice" on Netflix - it's SO informative and interesting.

Here are a bunch of pictures from when Kevin and I were hiking around on the glacier!  Any of the bright blue that you see is actually ice... Some of it kinda looks like water, and some other parts kinda look like snow, but trust me that everything is ice.  It's amazing and beautiful, and we had SO much fun!!! 

A close-up of the ice! 

Me!  It was seriously such a fun day!! 

These formations (and the big holes caused by rocks, like the one just beyond the white-ish rock) are called moulins (like Moulin Rouge), and they happen because rocks absorb heat and then cause the ice below them to melt at a more rapid pace. 

After we had thoroughly explored the glacier for a few hours, we got back in the canoe and paddled the 1 hour back to the car to take us back to the downtown area of Juneau!  Kevin and I spent a little time exploring Juneau, but we were pretty exhausted so we went back to the ship in time for dinner.   It was such a fun day!!  

Some cool artwork on the side of a building in Juneau!