Saturday, September 13, 2014

Alaska - Juneau

This is one of the first pictures I took as we started to see land in Alaska. It'a also one of my favorite pictures. There's no filter -just the way the light came through as we headed up to Juneau.

Our first cruise stop was Juneau, Alaska. Our excursion was a whale watching photo safari. The excursion consisted of a boat ride to whale watch and a hike to Mendenhall Glacier.

We were two days into the trip at this point and anxious to see some wildlife. Ricky and I were both very excited to see some whales. It wasn't as close as we hoped for but we did get to experience the miraculous show of the whales bubble feeding.  It was quite fascinating as a pod of approximately 8-10 whales would shoot out of the water as the scoop a mouth full of haring. The tricky part was that you never knew where they were going to come up at. The seagulls would give you about a five second warning as they started to flock to the area in hopes of catching their own lunch from the whales hard work.

  Luckily, the hiking trail was fairly smooth and as a group we went quite slow which made it easy for me to keep up with my injured ankle. Our tour guide went into the water to gran a large chunk of the glacial ice that was floating nearby.  We all got to hold it and it, as expected, was freezing cold but also very very dense. I captured a few great nature shots along the way as well.
 On our way back to the dock our guide took a detour and showed us an area where the haring where spawning. That was an amazing site. I had never seen so many fish in one place like that before and in such shallow water.
 Instead of going straight back to the boat after our excision, we went into the town to check it out. We ate dinner at a famous old saloon in town.  
I'm not normally one to get over excited about potato salad but they did have the best potato salad I've ever eaten. 
It was exactly what I would expect an old saloon to look like inside.
We then strolled the mile of gift shops that keep that town in business before heading back to our ship.

No comments: