Thursday, July 2, 2015

I'm back from vacation

I'm back after a 13-day vacation with included an Alaskan Cruise and sight-seeing in Washington State.  Here are just a few photos summarizing our trip that I took with my cell phone. Regular posting will resume shortly.

This was the ship we sailed to Alaska on, the MS Westerdam (operated by Holland America).

Our home away from home for 7 days.


Some Alaskan coast line from sea.


Of course, the food was wonderful.


We mostly had good weather, except in Ketchikan where it rained all day. Here's the ship's pool with the roof open.


Back in Seattle we had dinner on the Space Needle.


We visited Mt. Ranier.

The weather in Washington state was wonderful, bright sunny days with temperatures in the upper 80's, leading to spectacular views of the mountains. All this sun and heat however is bad for the state as they are in a prolonged drought. This is supposed to be the rainy season there.

Then we visited Mt. St. Helens.

This is looking right into the side of the mountain that blew out back in 1980. This cruise was to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary which was on May 17. The Mt. St. Helens eruption was also 35 years ago, on May 18.

On the morning of our flight home we had some time to visit the Pacific Bonsai Museum near our hotel.

 This place was awesome. This is a Japanese maple started in 1956. Long time readers of this blog may remember postings of my attempts at bonsai. Nothing I've done approaches even the poorest specimen at the museum.

2 comments:

cynicalbuddha said...

Looks like an awesome trip. did you do any shore excursions? And I didn't know if you knew this but Ketchikan's nickname is Rain City.

capewood said...

We saw the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, took a wildlife tour in Sitka and a duck boat tour in Ketchikan. We heard they get 13 feet of rain a year in Ketchikan.