My national parks

If you’ve been watching public television at all lately, you cannot have missed the fact that Ken Burns has a new documentary that’s coming out now about the national parks.  They’ve got this nifty mapping app on the PBS Web site that you can use to map all the national parks you’ve been to (and [...]

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Can you get there from here?

Our excursion from Skagway to Haines and the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve was definitely the single best day of our trip.  But we almost didn’t get there, and the story about my numerous foiled attempts to make arrangements tells you something about the difficulties of traveling in Alaska – especially if you’re on a [...]

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Tennessee Travelers

Sarah thought that only she could post pictures of herself to a blog. Then she entered . . . the Medici Zone.

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Juneau: After the Twisted Fish

After my rafting trip on Mendenhall Lake and River, Mom and I reconnoitered and spent the afternoon on dry land in Juneau. (Well—they tell me it was dry land.  I could feel the earth moving under my feet after so much time on the Pacific Ocean.  And it rained hard enough to soak through the [...]

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Skip the gefilte fish: Swallow a trout . . .

Yesterday, I celebrated Rosh Hashanah in the home of my 3-year-old nephew, Bugaboo.  Bugaboo has been a great lover of rhyme, rhythm, and onomatopoeia for about a year, and, upon returning from Alaska, I discovered that he is now able to appreciate a bad pun. I found this out on the first sing-through of a book [...]

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“The Real Alaska”: Rain over Mendenhall

As we docked in Juneau, we were greeted by rain, clouds over the mountains, and the same types of tourist shops we had seen surrounding the docks in Ketchikan.  (“That’s the real Alaska,” I heard over and over again, every time it rained, from everyone who worked in the tourist industry.)  In general, people don’t [...]

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Ketchikan – Not a lot of cars but rush hour for salmon

When I got back from the canoeing excursion to Lake Harriet Hunt, I had only about an hour and a half available to walk around Ketchikan before I had to get back to the ship.  That was okay.  It wasn’t very big, and I didn’t want to spend any time in the rows of tourist-trap [...]

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Lake Harriet Hunt picture book

The story of our trip to Lake Harriet Hunt for my 3-year-old nephew: See the previous post for the adult version of the story.

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Librarian’s lake

  Our first Alaskan port was Ketchikan.  I was excited to arrive because I had convinced my mother to go on her very first paddling trip with me, somewhere in the Tongass National Forest (the cruise ship excursion description didn’t tell us where).   Knowing that we were going to the Tongass National Forest didn’t help [...]

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Cruising north off the Canadian coast

      ‘Nuff said?

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