Thursday

Thursday….it’s been a rainy day here in Icy Straight, Alaska. The enormous amount of warm clothing has paid off, because we’ve needed almost all our cold weather gear. Today we went on a whale watch cruise…I’m not sure exactly how many different whales we saw, but there had to be 30-50 different sightings…it was spectacular. At one point the boat stopped and a cow & calf came within 75 feet of the boat….it was raining pretty hard and most of the time I didn’t even attempt to take any photos…just enjoyed the awesome sights.

Yesterday we stopped in Sitka. I heard a lady today say that she didn’t see why we stopped there…that it wasn’t that great. Well, apparently she didn’t go to the National Historical Park like we did….that was soooooooooooooooooooo nice. I think Sitka was my favorite port of the trip. The park is really beautiful…and then what I had been waiting for…shopping for a Russian nesting doll. My head spun there were so many beautiful choices of Matrioshka dolls. Mark was a saint…waited 2 hours for me to do my shopping. (he did snap a pic of one of the shelves in one of the stores....he had my camera around his neck while I shopped, and he just clicked the shutter very discretely.)

Last night we bought tickets to a mystery dinner theatre here on the ship. That was fun and we had dinner with some interesting people. Tonight is another ‘formal’ night, so we have to dress up again. Mark hates dressing up, but does so to please me. What a great guy.

Tomorrow (Friday) is a day at sea…a day to rest up and I’ll try to re-pack for the Saturday departure…our land tour begins on Saturday. Home whatever day the 18th falls on. I’ve lost all track of days here. It’s been one long wonderful vacation. I hope everyone gets to take this trip at least once in their life.