Next week I’ll tell you more about the ship and the people on our Alaskan adventure, and we still have the amazing story of the Aleuts in Juneau and the Russian Orthodox church there, but for this week, please enjoy vicariously the photos we snapped. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is value for time. :]

Every time I woke up, I’d sneak out onto the balcony, and the views were always amazing. This is the first night, when the supermoon had just started waning.

Dawes Glacier was a huge chunk of ice, with pieces breaking off and refreezing over time. It is named for Henry Dawes, a laywer and politician from Massachusetts who apparently knew the right paperwork to file, because it had been named in 1890 by John Muir as Young Glacier after his companion The Rev. Hall Young, but Dawes renamed it in 1891 and the name stuck. The fog started coming in just as we were leaving the glacier; the whiter parts are the ice.

There were so many waterfalls, the disembodied voice that came on the ship’s com and began telling us things said, because there had been significant rainfall the week before. Normally the mountains don’t have so many waterfalls.

Pack ice was all over the place as we went north, always close to shore though. Sometimes they looked like dragons or other mythical creatures and you began to understand why mariners thought they’d seen monsters.

I

The day the entire boat sat silent, taking in the grandeur of the glacier and fjords, we were also freezing on our balconies. Beth and Brandon waved from next door just before securing us all the day’s cocktail: Mallibu hot chocolate (rum added). We never found out how cold it was, but it reminded me of my days in grad school in Newfoundland, when the pack ice would come in and breathing near the ocean felt like ice razors were sliding down your throat.

More next week, including some of the fun fun people and silly things we did. But here’s one final shot of Jack enjoying the views. He said later that the balcony room had paid for itself – and that cruising was his ideal vacation: You sit with a drink in your hand watching the scenery walk past you.