Alaska cruise part 1: Glaciers!

A travelogue post! With a bit of knitting…

I had the pleasure of teaching on the Vogue Knitting Alaska Cruise earlier this month. I hadn’t been to Alaska since working five summers in a Kodiak Island cannery to pay for college, so I was looking forward to seeing more of the state, and not being covered in fish slime.

We sailed on the Holland America Eurodam, which can accommodate 2000 passengers. This is a nice sized ship, not overwhelming, but big enough to have lots of options for dining and amusements.

DH came with me on this trip. Can a marriage survive a week sharing a room this size? Sure! Just don’t make me share a closet! One of us is tidier than the other…

It was still summer when we sailed out of Seattle, and we made the most of it!

The next day was spent at sea, which meant there were no distractions from knitting class. Except for the orcas that we missed because we weren’t watching for them.

Laura began the increases and decreases by the end of class, and she finished her hat before the end of the cruise. Well done!

This was the one day that the seas were a bit rough (because we were on the ocean rather than in the Inside Passage), so I treated myself to a lovely lunch of ginger ale and some random pretzels from my travel bag (Alaska Airlines, maybe?). And Dramamine. Yum! Things smoothed out a few hours later.

Juneau was our first stop, the next morning. Friends Tim and MJ were on this cruise with us too. Tim was in our wedding 41 years ago. Time flies! My two goals for Juneau: To visit a yarn shop for qiviut, and to see the Mendenhall Glacier. I’m a science nerd.

It takes 200 years for ice to move from its beginning as as snow on the Juneau Icefields to the terminus of the glacier at Mendenhall Lake.

Stunning. It really is a river of ice. And it’s huge.

It’s an easy walk to Nugget Falls. The visitors give you a better sense of how big the glacier and falls are. I met a man the next day who had taken a dip into the lake below Nugget Falls; he’s a fan of ice baths. Brrrrrr no thank you! But he did help me spot mountain goats with my binoculars.

It’s someone’s job to put glacial ice samples under the sign every day. These are the things I think about…

The next day we cruised Glacier Bay. This is a national park and preserve, and park rangers came on board to narrate the day. This was my favorite day of the trip.

The face of the Johns Hopkins Glacier is 250 feet high.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tusbgKbN_Jk%3Fsi%3DxVcmw1F_heQpobOZ

We saw several calvings (ice falling from the face of the glacier)

The Johns Hopkins Glacier has been off limits to cruise ships for most of the summer, to protect the harbor seal pupping grounds. The pups spend their time on ice floes, safe from predators. This visit was the first for the Eurodam since the beginning of summer.

I took this last photo through my binoculars, and cropped it. All for you, dear reader!

All in all, a spectacular day. But the fun wasn’t over. The Eurodam serves tea every afternoon at 3 pm, so we had a Knitters’ Tea. Bonus points if you decorated a hat (supplied by VK) for it.

And it happened to be my birthday, so there was a bit of cake, too.

This post has gone long, so I’m going to end with this glacier day, and begin another post with salmon, another Alaskan treasure.

Onward!