Glacier Bay Day

Our final two days will be “at sea” and Saturday was spent tooling around “Glacier Bay.” This is a U.S. National Park, but when you visit on a cruise ship, the park rangers hop on board and talk to you over the sound system and give slide presentations in the theaters. Glacier Bay was pretty cool….it was a gorgeous sunny day and the snowy mountains were quite amazing. Lots of chunks of ice floating in the bay – from chunks of glaciers falling off into the water as the glacier ever so slowly moves to the sea. No floating chunks that made us worry about a Titanic incident or anything, although we were pretty sure we didn’t want to fall into the water.

Even though we’d already WALKED on a glacier earlier in the week, this was a different “glacial experience” and still incredible. We were on the wrong side of the ship at one point when we heard a lot of oohs and aaahs and a huge splash, meaning that one of the chunks of the front of the glacier had let loose. We were on the correct side later when we got to see a couple of pieces cut loose, and we had the video camera rolling, so we’re hoping that footage turns out well.

We’re pretty familiar with the cruise ship now and we only discovered one or two spots today that we hadn’t seen before. We continue to be awed by the magnitude of this thing. We saw a show in the main theater on Saturday night called “Dance” and, while the talent wasn’t necessarily up to par of what we see at the Orpheum in Phoenix, the stage production, props, lighting, costumes were quite amazing. Full sets sliding on and off the stage and lowered from above….where do they PUT all that stuff???

Just before dinner we were in our rooms getting ready and I looked out over the balcony and spotted a humpback whale just off the ship…watched for a minute and ended up spotting a couple more and got some nice video. It was cool to find something like that without being escorted by a tour operator or something – maybe they really ARE real!?!

Tomorrow we’ll be finishing up the rest of the journey toward Anchorage. We will arrive in “College Fjord” late in the afternoon and will see some more glaciers.

Thanks for checking in with us throughout the week, if you have. This will be the last post we’ll make from Alaska, as on Monday morning we are “disembarking” (cruise-speak for “leaving”) the ship at something ridiculous like 7:15AM. What will we do then? Who will feed us? Where will we go to get warm?

It’s been a “rough” week…yet we look forward to getting home and seeing our awesome boys. Will try to put up a final post or two later in the week to wrap things up. We are scheduled to be in Phoenix LATE Monday night.

Kevin & Jocelyn signing off from Alaska…