For sleeping in a place where the lights never go out, we actually slept quite well. We went to the dining room at the agreed upon time, involving a long walk across the foot bridge from the dormitory for breakfast. We sat down with Mike who was busy chowing down on his hot breakfast with coffee. He says he needs the coffee to stay awake, and we didn’t see anything wrong with that. I got an over-sized chocolate chip cookie and a Dr. Pepper; and, shared the cookie with Sharon. We’ve pretty much noticed two things about the diet of Alaskans: They love their chocolate chip cookies and the love Dr. Pepper. Both are found in abundance just about everywhere we’ve gone. We needed to be on the road at 7:15AM sharp, and Mike had made ... read more

After a night of little rest and even less sleep I awoke with Sharon declaring “Eureka”! I thought that she’d discovered the motherload in Fairbanks; but, perhaps just as good, she’d found the Pike’s Waterfront Lodge and they had a room for us tonight. Our tour at Gold Dredge Number 8 had been moved back to 10:30AM so we were in no rush this morning; still, we wasted no time going out to breakfast. We used GoogleMaps to find the nearest Denny’s, and as it turned out, it was just around the corner where we discovered that this was the northernmost Denny’s. It was not particularly busy on this Thursday morning, and we had a seat by the window. I chose my normal eggs over medium breakfast; but, with jalapeno bacon breakfast, and it did have ... read more

The morning dawned and again we were facing the possibility of inclement weather accompanying us onto Prince William Sound. Before you wonder how today’s Prince William got his name attached to a sound in Alaska, chill for a second. This Prince William was the third son of King George III. We had big hopes that this boating tour would be as photographically productive as our previous visit here during our first trip to Alaska about six years ago. We’re just hoping that we’ll be able to take the pictures of gleeful otters at play in the water or massive walls of ice falling to the sea; and, that they won’t be missed due to people being oblivious to others trying to take a picture. On our whale watching outings there had been multiple cases of people ... read more

We got our wake-up call at 5:30AM with our disembarkation scheduled for 7:15 in “Wave 3”. This is a departure from previous exits from HAL ships where luggage off-load tags were called (for example, our bags were tagged with BLACK-1). This time each wave included several types of tags and colors that were on your disembarkation instructions but they only called the wave. I just got some rolls/croissants to eat with some cheese and cold-cuts. Sharon got a couple waffles. We went back to our cabin and waited as first Wave 1 was offloaded, followed by Wave 2. We pulled our carry-ons with us as we went down to Deck 2 to exit the ship for one final time (at least for now) when they called Wave 3. The cruise director Jordan was there to say ... read more

We started the day up in the Lido: Fried eggs and bangers for me and French Toast for Sharon. This will be Sharon’s third visit to Glacier Bay, involving a day of scenic cruising in this Ranger hosted maritime visit to the large national park; and, for her it looks like the third time is the charm. Her previous visits here, including one with me two years ago, have been plagued by fog and inclement weather. I checked on the way back to our cabin after breakfast; but, was correct in my suspicion that no Sudoku puzzles were available in the library. Sharon went out on the Lower Promenade to take pictures where I briefly joined her before returning to the cabin to add an additional layer and the fetch the binoculars. The wind was up ... read more