We’re back from Alaska!
Last night, after some 17 hours of travelling (or 30 hours if you count the trip from Seward to Anchorage in the morning) (or 10 days if you consider the fact that we were travelling in some form or another almost every day were were gone!), Sub-Evil Boy and I returned from our wonderful trip to Alaska with my folks, my sister (Misty), and my foster sister (Linda) and her husband (John).
My folks (mostly Dad) planned a great trip, full of powerfully memorable events. There’s so much to write about, and absolutely tons of stuff that I need to be doing here, so it’s going to be a challenge. I took over 7K photos on the trip, which would be something like 200 rolls of film back in the “old” days, or several thousand dollars of film and processing. I’ll be posting photos to Flickr as I clean them up, but I suspect that process will take several weeks. (Sub-Evil now has a Flickr account, and has already posted quite a few pictures from the trip.)
Some highlights:
- Gorgeous weather. One could easily spend a week in Alaska and not see many (even any) of the mountains, but Mom’s amazing luck with weather continued to hold and blessed us with some spectacular views (e.g., the view of Denali at the top of the post, and the view of Northwestern Glacier below).
- Denali National Park, which is a remarkably vast and has a scope that’s really hard to get your head around. The wildlife was cool, but personally I found the immensity of the place far more affecting; I’ll try to say more on this subject in some later post.
- The train trips from Denali to Anchorage and from Anchorage to Seward on the Alaska Railroad. I love train travel, and these are easily some of the most spectacular trips on offer.
- Getting up close and personal with the Northwestern Glacier (pictured below). We had an excellent day on the boat with the Kenai Fjords Tours and saw lots of amazing things (orcas, humpbacks, birds, otters, seals, sea lions, etc.), but the half hour watching and listening to the glacier was truly awe inspiring. The power and scale of the thing is quite overwhelming, all the more so knowing that this huge glacier (and many others like it) will disappear in Sub-Evil’s lifetime.
- An excellent day fishing with Dad, Misty, and Sub-Evil on Puffin Fishing Charters. We again had great weather, saw some incredible views, and caught a nice set of silver salmon. Our share of the fillets should arrive tomorrow, so there’s a lot of nice salmon on the menu this week! (The photo of Dad is from that trip.)
- All the wonderful time with the family. In theory this was all to celebrate my folks’ 50th wedding anniversary (which isn’t actually until next summer, but this was when we could run the trip), but ended up being a great celebration of the whole family. (It’s a major bummer that WeatherGirl and Neal [Misty's SO] couldn’t join us to complete the group, but sometimes life is complex.) Huge thanks to Mom and Dad for everything up to and including this fantastic trip!
A few more pictures for good measure: Northwestern Glacier, an orca, and a wonderful glacial melt waterfall from the Kenai Fjords Tour boat, and a Tufted Puffin taken at the nice Alaska SeaLife Center.
And I had a bit of comment spam waiting for me pushing window blinds. I guess it’s a nice change from on-line gambling, loans, and sexual enhancements…
Oh, and it’s damndedly hot and dry here in Morris, but at least the temperature is supposed to change tonight. Probably too late to save a lot of the crops, though.
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