Alaska Here We Come!

Q.  Alaska and back in just one week?!  How can that be?
A.  Holland America driving, Holland America cooking, Holland America cleaning....like that!

A short cruise, with Steve's cousins Don and Lynn, took us from Seattle to Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, Victoria and back to Seattle.  Who would think we would wind up on the same ship that my second cousin, Kelly and her husband Steve, and son, Chase are on???  So, yes, a "cousin cruise" it is!

Tuesday finds our ship slowly progressing up Tracy Arm into glacier territory.  The blue bergs dotting the channel are fascinating in that each seems to be a carved shape of something.  Any ideas?

Floating ice caves?


                  Or could this be a sinking ship?  Surely NOT!

It's a long way up Tracy Arm and at one point we make a hard right angle turn.  It's slow going.

Chunks of ice drift off to the side of our track, going no where.  It's hard to see how far down the ice goes.

We crawl up Tracy Arm...it's a long, long way 

Trees and Mist, Mist and Trees

Cascading waterfalls all along the shore

Water speeds down the cliff

Blue ice, miles of it, the mountains and then....the sea

Our ship noses into area where Tracy Arm splits into a "Y" and Sawyer Glacier is to the left, South Sawyer Glacier to the right.  We edge down the channel to the right.  Slowly the Oosterdam heads for the place where blue glacial ice meets the sea.  We go in so far I cannot imagine how the turn around will happen?  Our Pilot and Captain use the thrusters to push ice chunks away from the ship and we soon are sideways in a channel that's just 2,400 ft. wide.  I wonder again....just what IS the length of the MS Oosterdam? (950 ft.!)  But then the turn is complete, we are facing "out."  But we aren't going anywhere?  The Captain has decided we will have dinner, stern to the South Sawyer Glacier, floating among blue ice sculptures, majestic mountain hillsides which disappear below the surface of green glacial water...and...of course, the rugged terminal edge of a glacial ice pack.  I've never dined at a glacier before!

Tonight we creep toward Juneau.  We are hoping for Humpback whales tomorrow.......