September 14th - Decent Temperatures

Last nights low temperature was in the high 40's and both yesterday and todays high was in the high 70's. It was wonderful.

Yesterday I volunteered at the Habitat Re-Store again. It was the first time I've been there since spring. Kathy, Kelsey & Lydia went to Westphalia, MO to look at some pans for baking cakes. Westphalia is about 30 miles southeast of here. Kelsey got some good buys on some baking pans.

Today Andy and I did some more work on the missing siding and back stoop. We did work diligently from 9 to 3, with an hour off for lunch, but by the time we quit it didn't look like we had done much.

Kelsey backed cakes and muffins this morning. Andy told me that Lydia at a couple of them and then later grabbed one that Kelsey had on her plate. She went into her "Princess Tent" to eat it. He opened the flap and took this photo.

Later Kathy went to Lydia's swimming lesson with Kelsey and Lydia.

More on Alaskan trip. Our route

Sunday afternoon and Monday we "sailed" from Seattle to Ketchikan, Alaska. We arrived in Ketchikan early Tuesday morning and spent most of the day in Ketchikan. Tom, Mary Lou, Les & Connie went on a tour to learn about Alaskan totem poles. Kathy and I just walked around Ketchikan. The weather was great. Sunny with highs around 60.

 You see strange things in Alaska.

Seaplanes were constantly taking off and landing.

Tuesday night we sailed to Juneau, AK, the capitol of AK. (It is the only state capitol that is only accessible by air or sea. There are no roads to get to the Juneau area. On the way we sailed up the Tracy Fjord. Maybe what was most amazing was that they could take a ship up such a narrow passage.

I took this at 6:30 AM, just after we had entered the fjord.

 I was on the far side of the ship as we made a turn around this rock bluff. We were really close to the rock wall. Remember that this ship is 950 feet long and 118 feet wide.

 This was where we turned around, the end of the fjord. That is a glacier in front of us, and those are small icebergs floating in the water. It was lightly raining by the time we got here.

After making our way back out of the fjord we headed for Juneau. We arrived around 2 PM. It was raining and windy while we were docking. I watched the process and it took a long time to get the ship secured against the pier. Kathy and I were supposed to leave on our tour of the Mendenhall Glacier at 3:00 but we weren't able to get off the ship to make the tour. Fortunately they had another one leave at 3:30 and they put on it.

The Mendenhall Glacier.

Sadly we did not have near enough time to explore around it. It was still misting rain.

After leaving the glacier we were bused to the small bay where the whale watching boats were moored. Our whale watching jet boat cruised at around 40 mph, with 30 passengers. Soon after we left a pod of Orcas (killer whales) were spotted. I thought the young lady who was our "naturalist" might wet her pants, she was so excited. She said they only see Orcas about once a month. We had them on both sides of the boat as we idled along. Then it was a 20 minute ride to another location were we saw a humpback whale and her calf. Humpback calves gain 5-7 pounds an hour. We heard that at a seminar, the night before we landed in Juneau. I asked Ali, our naturalist, about it and she said that the upper range is 8# and hour. It rained almost the entire time we were on the whale watching boat. Since it was enclosed it wasn't a problem.

Wednesday night we sailed to Skagway. More on that another time.

I hope you all had a wonderful day. May God bless you and yours.