Alaska Trip - The Cruise

Now it's time to share the part of our tour on the cruise ship, Island Princess.  It was a week long trip from Whittier to Vancouver, going through Glacier Bay and stopping at Skagway, Juneau, and Ketchikan.

But first let me introduce you to members of our tour group.  Nice group of people.  It was fun to get to know them all.








  






The Tour Leaders, Rhonda and Todd.                        The "Star" of "Voice on the Ocean." Lyle

  

    


Now on to the ship and glances of it and some of the activities.



Our balcony room.



One of the pools.  I planned to swim in this one, but I ended up using the outdoor pool one day, but  I didn't get a picture of that one.



Bob played ping pong 3 times, won 2nd place the first time and 1st place the other 2 times.  He is a bit competitive.  I played once, but they played too early in the morning for me.



The library was the center for signing up for the extra activities, like sudoko's, puzzles, the scavenger hunt, the egg drop contest, and a book club/review that I decided to do because the name of the book was I am Lucy Barton.  Since my name was in the title I felt compelled to read it which I did and joined in on the book talk the last day on the ship.  I also won the scavenger hunt, even though my stewardess accidentally threw away the items I had collected, but I still had gotten a bunch of staff signatures, and pictures that were required.  And I also won the egg drop contest.  There was only one other contestant.  We both won.  The egg drop contest was in the beautiful atrium.  Fun times.

  

  

The captain and some of the crew.

  

Special cooking show with a tour of the kitchens that followed.  Fun show and interesting to see the kitchens.



Music in the atrium every night.




  Our first stops at sea with no port, were some stops at Glacier Bay National Park where we saw lots of neat glaciers.  I have lots and lots of pictures, but the neat views showed the blue in the glaciers which makes them look so beautiful.  I'll show some but not all the views.

  


  

Our first port was Skagway. We did not take any extra excursions, but we got off the ship and toured the town.  It was a picturesque village.


  

  

  

This is their snow plow.

  

Here is one of the locals that was "dragging main" in his old Hudson.  Bob arranged for me to get a ride with him.  I had to wave to everyone as we drove down the streets of Skagway.  He was a very interesting man.  Bob said he was the acting mayor too, but I'm not sure of that.  But he has his masters in archeology and his wife has her doctorate in something (I forget what.)  I tried to sell my convertible to him, but he already had a Le Baron, not a convertible though.  We had a great visit, and he added to our visit in Skagway.

  

Here was a view from the ship before we set sail.  The water was glistening.  And another view of the scenery from the town.

  

Our next stop was Juneau.  We didn't really do too much there,




My sisters insisted that we, at least, go to the Mendenhall Glacier.  So we did go to a couple of kiosks to see about a trip there.  To our delight we got a great deal.  Buy one, get one free.  The sales people in the kiosks were very competitive because this was the last cruise ship of the season so we benefited from that.  We got 2 ticketa to the glacier for $30. We were very happy.

  

This is an iceberg that looks like a seaplane that has landed on the lake.

  

Here is a close up view of the glacial ice.  Here was a monitor that says it like it is.

  

We walked on a trail there.  It was very nice.  We got a little different view of the glacier.

   

On the trail, we also ran into a mama bear with her 3 cubs.  There were several of us trying to get pictures.  I did get a picture of the cubs but not the mama.  Someone in our tour group got good pictures of these 3 bears in a little different part of the park.  I decided to quit taking pictures when the mama was slowly walking in the bushes towards us.  Time to go.

  

Our next port was Ketchikan.  We enjoyed walking around the town.




  

We found the Visitors Center for the Tongass National Forest and learned about the history of the town and the area.  We learned there was the Indian side of town and the New Town after the missionaries, etc. came.  There is a tunnel that separates them.  We also learned about the totem poles.

  

  

In Newtown we found historical Hopkins Alley so in honor of our family name I had to take pictures.

  

Our last day was spent at sea on our way to Vancouver.  We just did ship activities and enjoyed the scenery as we sailed south.

Everything went very smoothly and we enjoyed our trip to Alaska.

We got some really good pictures of mountains on our plane that I'll share.  I think we saw Mt. St. Helens and maybe Mt. Hood.