After Glacier Bay, the ship cruised though College Fjord before arriving in Whittier at about midnight. There are many glaciers in College Fjord and they are named after eastern colleges. We didn't get a lot of time to sightsee here because we were taking part in a music trivia contest on the ship. (took second) We would spend the night there in the harbor before disembarking at around 9:00 in the morning. We would then have a 1-1/2 hour bus ride to the Anchorage Airport where we would pick up a rental car. I kept wondering why our ship wasn't going all the way to Anchorage as some cruise ships do. It turns out that a lot of people take the train tour up to Denali National Park and then further north to Fairbanks. The train ... read more

We arrived in Skagway about 7:00 in the morning. It was another of those early wakeups for me. I gave up trying to get back to sleep at 4:30 and headed up to deck 14 to see the scenery. The further north we've gotten the longer the daylight has been. It didn't get dark until about 11:30 and at 3:00 AM it was rather light. By 4:30, it was definitely daylight. The ship traveled ever more slowly as we got closer to Skagway because the waterway got very narrow. Skagway was high on my personal list of places to visit because I've always been interested in the gold rush days and the adventures of the propectors in this rugged part of the world. Reading Jack London's books as a young guy stoked that interest. In a ... read more

We've been sailing all night through the Strait of Georgia with Vancouver Island to the west. It rained a bit last night. We spent the entire day at sea. The dinner last night was one of the two "Let's play dress up" dinners for the cruise. It was a very nice evening and a fine dining experience. Marilyn popped for some excellent wine and we all had a very good evening. We hit a couple of bars with some entertainment and had a blast. Thank God we picked up another hour in moving northwest toward Ketchikan over night. The ship arrived in Ketchikan at 6:30 AM. As usual, I was up at 5:00 AM to watch the sunrise and arrival into Ketchikan. Ketchikan is a cute little fishing town with mountains all around. I knew that ... read more

It's now Wednesday morning and we're trying to recover from a horrendous day of travel courtesy of United Airlines. I'll try to make this brief, but the only thing I could think of all day yesterday was that if the CIA wants to get information from terrorists, they should just book them on a trip with United. They'll tell them everything they know just to make it end. Waterboarding is humane compared to what we went through. As Dan said, United's motto should be, "Bend over and leave the driving to us." Our itinerary was to fly from O'Hare to Vancouver non-stop, departing O'Hare at 8:15 AM and arriving in Vancouver at 10:30 AM. We would be starting our cruise Wednesday at 3:00 PM and that would give us the better part of a day to ... read more

The snow storm started last night and when we woke up it was a real blizzard. Overnight we received about 10" of snow and it was still coming down hard. The snow was piling up while we waited for it to subside a bit before going riding. Jan decided to stay at the lodge since she knew she wouldn't enjoy breaking trail in over a foot of new snow. As it turned out, we received about 16" of snow by the time it ended. Some other parts of northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula got up to 20" from this storm. Pat, Dawn and I headed south toward Conover, WI. It was still snowing pretty hard when we got on the trail. There were a couple tracks from previous sleds, but not much. Pat was leading ... read more