Alaska Trip - Part 1

Finally a post about our Alaskan cruise.  It's going to be in 3 parts because I have uploaded 74 pictures.  I have over 400.

This trip was amazing.  Steve and I have already looked into doing it again.  We were so completely spoiled.  

 We left from Seattle on a gorgeous sunny day.  It was truly just the beginning of the amazing weather we had the whole week.

The first view of our ship.  It's the big one.

We were the first to arrive.  We were joined by Steve's Mom, sister, brother-in-law.  My Aunt and Uncle and cousins, plus the wine club we were traveling with.

We got checked in and headed up to the pool deck to wait for everyone else to arrive.  Seattle isn't to far so we drove, everyone else was flying in from California.  We saw some big buses come in and figured they were on it.  We were right.  Here comes Steve's Mom and Aunt.

We knew it would take them a while to get checked in and on the ship so we decided to check out our room.  You know its going to be a great cruise when this is what was waiting for us.

From our veranda we could see the passengers getting on the ship.  We popped the champagne kicked back and waited for everyone to get on board.

Here comes Dave and Kelli (Steve's sister and brother-in-law).

Of course here is our lugage.  Why wouldn't I take a picture of it? Mine is the big blue bag in the right cart.

Here comes everyone else.  Doreen is on the phone with Steve.  We couldn't get there attention from yelling so we had to call.

Taking their picture.  Gotta love zoom lenses.  After this trip I decided I needed a more powerful lens.  My shots of the Momma eagle with her babies just didn't turn out.  Oh well.......memories.

I mentioned we were traveling with a wine club.  My cousin owns a winery in California and this trip was put together by them.  So in addition to enjoying Alaska, we also enjoyed wine tasting events.  It was a lot of fun getting to know the people in the club.  Especially getting to know a co-Nikon owner.  We traded stories about our cameras, our dream cameras and we are competing with each other in a photo contest.  We talked more about our cameras then we did about our kids or the wine we were tasting.  The pictures I am posting are SOOC (straight out of the camera), no photo shop.  The only editing I did was just to crop stuff out.

Our view of Seattle as our ship leaves.

Steve and I spent so much time on the decks.  Our veranda door was always open.  The sunsets were amazing.  Our first night on the ship.

Steve all dressed up and ready for our first dinner.   This isn't our first cruise and I knew that our dinners would be amazing, but I was blown away at how wonder the food and the service was.  By the end of our trip we were truly sad to say goodbye to our waiters, Arnold and Icommar.  Dave tried to take Icommar home with him.

This is a sample of what was delivered to our room each night before dinner.  I still get out of bed and expect to see food.

We are up on the 15th floor, getting into the elevator looking down.  Our deck is the one with all the chairs and below that is a giant tree suspended in the middle of the ship.  I have a better picture coming up somewhere in these posts.

Sitting on our veranda getting ready to do something and what is that?????   A Whale!!!!!  We saw a ton of them that night.  So many that the room a few doors down from us turned in into a drinking game.

Steve is enjoying the good life, sitting in his comfy robe.

Every night we would have a new friend waiting for us in our room.  Plus our beds are turned down with a chocolate waiting on our pillow.  I don't understand why this can't continue at home.  I suggested to the kids they should do this and they rolled their eyes.  This is a good shot of our room.  You can see our incredible view and the closets and bathroom is behind me.

Our first stop is Ketchikan.  Here we are chasing after Kelli who wanted to see the totem museum.  We never found it, but we did discover a couple of very cool bars.  Anyway, we where laughing so hard at Craig yelling at Kelli that we could barely walk.  Craig is a cousin so he could get away with it. And this was after our first bar stop.  As a joke, I ended up buying Kelli a totem so she could take home.  She said, "you got me the eagle one that I wanted."  I didn't know it was the one she wanted, it was the only one at the ship gift shop.

A quick shot of Steve and I with our ship in the back ground.

And Craig.

And of course, life boat #15.  It is our assigned lifeboat if anything went wrong.  I just thought I would point that out.
 

One of the things that I wanted to see on this trip was a Bald Eagle.  Here he is.  He is just a baby, and his head hasn't turned white yet.  I used my zoom for this shot, but I really didn't need it, he was really close.

He decided to be a good sport and give me a flying shot.  I didn't care about the bears or the whales, I wanted to see a Bald Eagle up close.  By the end of the trip I saw several.  I don't think I could ever get tired of seeing them.  They are amazing and beautiful and can see why they are our National Bird.

This picture is at our second bar stop.  Happy Bears.  I will talk more about this bar and why it is call Happy Bears in my next post.  I will tell you this, we discovered a new drink and were feeling nooooo pain.  Thank goodness the boat was close.