Well, I’ve been back from the vacation for a few weeks now, and I have yet to blog… until now. It was a fabulous, wonderful, awesome, vacation. I wanted to get all my pictures up and edited and so forth before I blogged about it, but it looks like it will be a loooong time before that happens. I also wanted to make a web page with all my pictures and descriptions and so forth, but I don’t think that’s going to happen at all.

So, we (my mother and I) went on a cruise to Alaska. It was actually a cruise-tour. We had a seven day cruise in Alaska’s inside passage starting in Vancouver, with stops in Ketchikan, Haines, Juneau, and Sitka, a day cruising to Hubbard Glacier, ending in Seward, then a three day trip to Denali National Park and back to Anchorage to catch a flight home.

The picture here is Hubbard Glacier and it was just pure magic to get up and out early and sit in a lounge at the top of the ship and watch the glacier come into view. It is hard to get a sense of scale in Alaska – the outdoors is so huge compared to anything I’ve ever seen before. This glacier is about six miles wide and 300-400 ft high above and below the water. In some of my shots I have a giant cruise ship in front of the glacier that helps create some sense of scale. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get closer or stay longer, But the glacier was magnificent, and evidently it is a rare thing to be able to see the tops of the mountains around the glacier. I took some shots of the bay/glacier and my good friend Clay stitched them together for me. I think this was my favorite part of the trip.

One frustration when it came to taking pictures of all the beautiful Alaskan scenery was that it was almost always behind a pane of glass. Whether it was a ship’s window, or a boat’s window, or a train’s window, or a bus’s window, there always seemed to be a window, with reflections. Yuck. So, getting good pictures of this trip was a challenge. I got a few good shots though and I’ll be sure to upload my pictures to flickr – with captions!

If you ever get a chance to go on a cruise to Alaska, I’d certainly recommend it. I wanted to go back as soon as I got home. There’s something about the remoteness and wildness and extravagant beauty of Alaska that really appeals to me. I kept thinking about living in such a place, but I don’t think I’m suited to it. I have too many conditions. And some of the ports we visited didn’t even have a nurse in town. Although apparently there are some psychiatrists in Alaska: In Juneau the bus driver who drove us to the helicopters and back was commenting on the problem of depression during the dark months. He said psychiatrists have to guess at how much light there will be and prescribe antidepressants accordingly to prevent seasonal affective disorder. Apparently he knew a woman who was prone to this problem. Well, last year (or a couple of years ago) there wasn’t as much dark as usual, so guess what happened? This woman went manic. (My mother and I were the only ones to chime in with the answer.)