Happy Monday! I’m starting the week with Holly and all of you! I hope you’ll link up with us for Hello Monday! I am so excited to start sharing our Alaska trip with you today. Please be ready for lots of pictures. I loaded the pictures from my phone, my mom’s phone, my dad’s phone, and our camera into Shutterfly and there are more than 1500 photos! I need to get Jeff’s pictures, Annie’s pictures, Zach’s pictures, and the boys’ pictures to add to my cache.

We left our house on Friday 6/26 after swim team practice and headed to Washington Dulles airport. We usually fly out of Baltimore but Dulles had a direct flight to Anchorage. Our flight left at 5:45 pm and arrived in Anchorage around 10:30 pm Alaska time. By the time we got to our hotel it was after 11 and we all just went straight to bed. We had to have our luggage packed and ready to go by 8 am so that the hotel/cruise line could get it on board for us. This was actually wonderful because we were tired and slept well. When we woke up, we were all on Alaska time. I couldn’t believe we didn’t have any time change issues!

Our hotel was just down the street from the ceremonial starting line for the Iditarod so I marched the guys out into the middle of the street for a picture. We also saw our first Alaskan totems on the walk.

Saturday 6/27, we had a short bus ride from the hotel to the train station. We boarded the Alaskan railroad and headed to Whittier to catch our cruise ship, the Discovery Princess. The ride was absolutely beautiful. There was a narrator who pointed out interesting things, animals, and unique nature-y things. We saw our first mountain goats, bald eagles, our first glacier of the trip, and had a great ride.

We moved through check-in and security quickly and were on board before 1 pm. Our rooms weren’t ready yet so we explored the ship a little and got some lunch. The boys found the ice cream shop, which they visited frequently the rest of the trip. They announced our rooms were ready so we headed to find them. I was hoping to have adjoining rooms, but we didn’t. We were able to open the door between our balconies and that was perfect. Princess uses medallions as keys, payment, etc. and we were able to link all four of our medallions so we could open both rooms. That was helpful, too. We spent the day exploring the ship and had an early dinner together. We played some cards after dinner and watched the other passengers dancing in the main area. It was pretty entertaining. We headed to our cabin to get ready for bed and I looked out the balcony one last time before closing the curtains. What great luck because we had our first whale sighting! We saw the “pfffffffft” of mist and kept watching to see a little bit of whale and a few more pfffffffts. What a cool way to end the day!

We woke up on Sunday 6/28 and had a day at sea. We entertained ourselves on the ship. It was chilly and misty but we didn’t let that hold us back. We watched a World Cup match on the big screen outside. They had towels out for anyone using the pools and these warm blankets everywhere. We bundled up quite often when we were outside. We were sailing by Hubbard Glacier today but our family elected not to do the excursion. It was getting on a smaller boat to get closer to the glacier for a few hundred dollars. We had a great view and didn’t need to. Luckily the captain of our ship was an ice captain and had the skills to get us close to glaciers all week.

We headed back to the same table for dinner that night, and every night on the ship. We had the same waiter all week and he was wonderful! Jeff is gluten free and all of the dining options were wonderful. Every night at dinner, the dining room manager came to Jeff with the next night’s menu and he could pick ANYTHING for them to make gluten free the next night. Perfection!!

I think I am going to stop here because the next day has SO MANY PICTURES!! Our itinerary for the trip was:
Saturday 6/27 – board the ship
Sunday 6/28 – day at sea, Hubbard Glacier
Monday 6/29 – day at sea, Glacier Bay National Park
Tuesday 6/30 – Icy Straight Point/Hoonah
Wednesday 7/1 – Juneau
Thursday 7/2 – Ketchikan
Friday 7/3 – day at sea
Saturday 7/4 – disembark in Vancouver
Sunday 7/5 – Vancouver and red eye home

I hope you enjoyed our first two days on the Disco Princess, our ship’s nickname. As Luke was overheard saying to some other teenagers on the ship, “This is a once in a lifetime trip!”. I’ll be back soon with the next installment of our trip. We have three swim meets this week, so it’s going to be a busy week. It’s our last week of swim team, so there’s always a bunch to do.If you blogged today, be sure to link up below! Have a great day full of sunshine and books!