Jacob's Road Trip Ramblings ... The Alaska Frontier

Our first cruise stop was Skagway. In my opinion, this was the best stop of the three, for reasons I will share momentarily. Skagway is a tiny town of about 850 residents (400 year-round), and the local industry is actually tourism. They see around 700,000 tourists in their port every year, and I can see why. We all piled into a helicopter out the fjord and around to the glacier. This in and of itself was amazing because not only do I love flying, but it was also my first experience in a helicopter. After about 20 minutes of flight, we got out on the glacier with our steel-studded boots and climbing poles. This was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. A huge field of glacial ice spread out before us in brilliant blues and whites. Given the season, there was clear, cold water flowing through parts of the glacier itself. These small streams had actually bored huge tunnels straight down to the bottom of the glacier. We all carefully leaned over to get a look at the amazing sight of the water disappearing into a mass of brilliant dark blue. Where we were standing, the glacier was more than 200 feet thick, and a mile and half across.



While less eventful, Juneau was still very interesting. We got off the ship, took a tram up the mountain, and looked out over the beautiful view of the harbor and surrounding fjord. There was also a bald eagle that was in captivity being cared for due to injuries. She was an amazing bird! We saw several bald eagles on our trip, and it was easy to see why they are the national bird. After our stop at the mountain, we came back down and wandered through the Juneau downtown until we decided to board the ship once again.

Our final stop was in Ketchikan and I’ll tell you what, it was another amazing Alaskan experience! We wandered off the ship and found a great opportunity to go flightseeing back into the Alaskan wilderness. Granddaddy, Grandmother, Jesse and I got the opportunity to fly for an hour over some of the most magnificent natural sights I have ever seen. Words and photos cannot describe the grandeur of the mountains and cliffs and waterfalls and forests. We eve landed in the middle of a remote mountain lake for a few minutes to get out on the pontoons and gaze out at even more splendor. It is an experience that continually reminded of how small I am...and of how great and majestic our God is! Overall, it was a mind-boggling experience, and definitely one of the trip highlights.



Overall the cruise was a lot of fun, and quite cold! I will never forget the things I saw up in Alaska, and we always love cruising with Disney. It was a wonderful, relaxing vacation with our grandparents, and we all had a fabulous week. Now time to head back down the coast!

Beth's Wildlife Report ...

Still no moose!

Alaska and Back (Jesse)

The past week plus has been absolutely amazing and has held some of the coolest sights of the trip! When I last reported, I was very close to boarding the beautiful ship Disney Wonder alongside my family and Grandaddy and Grandmother! I will apologize for not blogging during that time, but we were devoid of Internet while on the ship.



Prior to getting on the ship however, our family ferried over and spent the night on Victoria Island. The next morning, we visited Buchard Gardens, which were absolutely beautiful! Some of the gardens that were included in the general garden were the Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden and many others, featuring some incredible plants, trees and flowers.

Our Alaskan cruise was seven days long, with the following schedule...

Tuesday - Board the ship
Wednesday - Day at sea
Thursday - Day at sea with a view of Traci Arm
Friday - Skagway
Saturday - Juneau
Sunday - Ketchikan
Monday - Day at sea
Tuesday - Disembark the ship

The ship's boarding process was very easy and allowed us to embark on the second leg of our journey in a painless fashion!!! The rest of the day was super fun and entertaining and the food was absolutely awesome! I love Disney Cruises! Wednesday and Thursday were also very relaxing and enjoyable. The other reason that Thursday was so amazing was because the ship passed through the Traci Arm Fjord, an amazingly beautiful passageway through a series of tall hills, covered with trees, which came right down to the edge of the water. Around this passage, I was very privileged to see some whales (I'm not sure what kind), as well as some otters! In addition, the icebergs were plentiful and very pretty. Overall, I really enjoyed the first couple of days on the ship!

Skagway was awesome!!! I had so much fun! We planned a glacier-walking excursion for the day, which included helicopter flights to and from the glacier. The helicopter rides to and from both provided some amazing views and a really cool feeling! The glacier that we visited was called Meade Glacier. Meade Glacier is approximately 32 miles long, 1.5 miles wide and 250 feet deep! That's about 334,540,800,000 cubic feet of glacial ice!!! Our tour guide also told us that every one hundred feet of snow that falls compresses into about one inch of glacial ice, so that means that in order for the glacier to have formed the way it is now, at least 300,000 feet of snowfall would have been needed, not to mention runoff! Also, the water running into the glacier created holes in the ice that must have been hundreds of feet deep! We were allowed to look down into these holes in the glacier and view the beautiful shade of blue that the ice takes on further down due to the lack of light at great depths. Another thing that amazed me was the fact that we were allowed to drink directly from the streams on the glacier because the water was so clean! After we returned from the glacier, we walked around Skagway for a very brief time, (the town is only about 23 blocks long and 4 blocks wide) and then returned to our ship, ready for food and hot chocolate! The glacier was definitely the coolest part of the trip!



Our day in Juneau was fairly short and uneventful. We decided not to schedule a shore excursion for either Juneau or Ketchikan. As a result, while in Ketchikan, we simply wandered around a bit. First, we took a bus to a sky tram station, on which we learned about Juneau's gold-mining history. Then, the sky tram took us to the top of a mountain, where we visited a store and saw a beautiful Bald Eagle! Later, we returned to sea level and wandered into a couple of stores in the city. The next day, (in Ketchikan), Grandaddy, Grandmother, Jacob and I took a seaplane for an hour-and-a-half ride over a beautiful national forest, more than one million acres in area, commissioned by Theodore Roosevelt during his presidency. This seaplane ride was amazingly beautiful! We saw waterfalls, forests and even "The Wall", a 3,000-foot, almost-sheer cliff face. Halfway through the flight, we landed on a beautiful lake nested in the mountains for some photos. In general, we had an awesome time!!!

After that, the rest of the time on the ship went quickly. We spent one more day at sea, before disembarking and driving back into the United States, Seattle to be precise, where we visited Pike's Market, an amazing, open-air market, where they sold everything from delicious fruit and two-foot crab legs, to magic supplies and old, US Army knives! All told, the market had to have been one of my favorite parts of the journey! Finally, we parted ways with Grandaddy and Grandmother and settled down for the night at our hotel room.

Wednesday was great too! After driving for a little while in the morning, we were privileged to have lunch with the Coughlins, a family of missionaries on vacation from Japan. That afternoon, the Coughlins took us to an amazing nearby park, where we played frisbee, wrestled and ate dessert! What a fun day!

Jacob's Road Trip Ramblings

On Sunday (7/24), we finally arrived in Vancouver! We got there early, so we actually decided to get on the ferry over to Victoria! That in and of itself was quite an experience. We actually drove our car right onto the ferry, parked it among all the others, and went up on deck. It was such a new and neat mode of transportation. I couldn’t believe that some people actually ferry back and forth every day for work. After checking into the hotel, we drove through the city for a little while, and stopped at a little dessert diner for a bite to eat.



The food was delicious and the city itself was very nice, feeling very much like it has great influence from Vancouver. On Monday we collected our grandparents from the ferry and went to see Butchart Gardens. Oh my goodness, it was the biggest garden I have ever seen! The colors and smells and varieties of all the flowers were overwhelming. Everything there was in bloom, and exquisite. There was a whole section devoted only to roses, and another to only Japanese flora. Well, after the gardens, we drove around the coast of Victoria for a while, then boarded the ferry back to Vancouver for the night.