Back From Our Alaska Cruise

We are finally back from our trip to Seattle and Alaska cruise. The weather was perfect, mid 60’s most of the trip with one day in AK in the 70’s! Who would have thought? We spent three days in Seattle visiting the center of town including the space needle, Pikes Place Market, and other attractions before boarding our cruise on Royal Caribbean. Our ports of call were Juneau, Skagway, through the Tracy Arm Fjord to Sawyer Glacier, Victoria BC, and then back to Seattle.

In Juneau we went on a Whale excursion and visited Mendenhall Glacier Park. We saw many humpback whales and Orca. Carina even got sprayed by a humpback whale! The glaciers were beautiful but it’s sad to see the rate at which they are melting. The loss is clearly visible as chunks were just breaking away at the water.

We then went to Skagway where we boarded a steam train and took a 4 hour ride through the White Pass summit and into Canada where we had a champagne toast and then another…and another…and another…by the time we got back to the station we were feeling pretty good.

They took the ship next through Tracy Arm Fjord navigating around icebergs where we spent about 45 minutes overlooking Sawyer Glacier and watching otters and sea lions trying to figure out what our ship was doing there.

The next port was Victoria BC which just happened to fall on Canada Day (Canada’s Independence Day). We took a tour of the city and visited Butchart Gardens just outside Victoria. The site was once a limestone quarry and was converted to a garden and sold to a private company that turned it into a park.

We then headed back to Seattle. Before we caught our red eye back to Dulles, we rented a car and visited the Woodland Park Zoo and Alki Beach west of Seattle. I took over 1200 pictures and about 30 videos on the trip which I am still sorting through. I hope to get them up on the site soon. It’s difficult to take a bad picture when the scenery is so beautiful. From minute to minute it changes and other things come into view. Now I have to deal with it all. Here are a couple of pictures I pulled from the disk.