The only way to get through writing about summer vacation is through. Or maybe to use Chat GPT, but nobody wants that. (Or do you?)
I don’t know why it’s hard to sit down and write sometime. I want to read blog recaps of my vacation. I want to have blog recaps of my vacation. I want you to read about my vacation. But, sitting down and writing about my vacation, it feels exhausting. Probably because I’m not on that vacation anymore, I’m back working, and working is exhausting.
In fact, simply existing in this country, this world, this is exhausting. I should stop checking the news, but I find it hard. BUT.
So at the end of July, Louie and I set out on our road trip. The plan: approximately one week visiting Leslie and family in Chautauqua as we love to do in the summer and then a camping road trip through Vermont, New Hampshire, and up into Maine towards Acadia, the final destination, and then turning back and driving two days to return to St Louis.
Easy peasy, if you like driving and mosquitoes. Which we do. Except the mosquitoes.
Any good road trip starts the day before with packing. I should do a blog post on packing for a camping trip, because we have it down to a science, if by science I mean, we have a list, and then we throw everything in the car and spend the next two weeks arguing over how we packed the car and disagreeing over where everything should go, and continually losing things and finding them again. And at some point, we will try to reorganize and decide that we have done a much better job than before but really it’s only because at that point half the clothes are in the dirty laundry bag and most of the food has been eaten…but that’s not important right now.
So we loaded up and added the bikes on the back, since this was also a trip with bikes. And we hit the road by 9 am, which was the plan.
We always drive in one day to Chautauqua, which says it will take 10 hours to get there and always takes much longer, so we end up stopping for dinner near Cleveland at a Mexican restaurant right off the highway. We’ve done this for the past few years and enjoy it.
And then we made it to Chautauqua! It was late, so Luca (my nephew) was already asleep but everyone else was still up.
The next few days don’t need a day by day, so I’ll just do highlights:
Pontoon boat ride: (Or “tonpoon” as Luca said later)
We rented a Pontoon boat for an afternoon on Chautauqua Lake. It was fun to ride around and then stop, drop anchor, and do some swimming.
We attended the weekly “Sunday party” and I saw an old classmate that I hadn’t seen in over a decade, which was fun. We attended several concerts and got to see Athena in something called Air Band as well.
Louie enjoyed a Louie IPA.
We went out to dinner at Pine Junction, which is a nice place to enjoy an outdoor meal, and on the way home saw some cows on the road.
It was a fun week. Weather wise, it started out really hot and humid, which you feel there because there is no A/C. By the end it had cooled off a little. It was great to see the kids, and I definitely felt a bit sad leaving, especially because I wished I had spent a little more time with Luca: he had camp all day and then went to bed early, so I felt like I got more time with Athena and less time with him, and the last night we went to a concert with her but left him…but it was still great to see everybody! We’ll have to get out to Phoenix this year somehow.
The kids and Peter (my BIL) were heading home for the summer since school was starting up pretty soon after we left, so it was the end for them, so it was bittersweet goodbyes all around. We loaded up the car and headed east to Vermont…
I was listening to a podcast the other day about back to school and checking off things on to do lists, and the host suggesting finding things to do that were fun as well, because that wasn’t fun, and I thought, what, checking things off IS fun! I guess I’m weird like that.
I was listening to another podcast (I listen to a lot of podcasts! especially while walking, exercising, and driving places) where somebody said they really enjoy paying bills makes them feel responsible and they enjoy that and I thought me too! I love when I do my bank stuff, it’s very enjoyable to do my accounting and add money to my accounts and move money around and figure out how much I have where and then put it where it needs to go and stuff like that. It’s quite fun!
Is that weird? I often enjoy these weird adulting things. Other adulting things I dislike, especially things involving phone calls.
But anyway. It’s the first week “back to school”. So far I’ve taught 17 lessons and I have an unknown number left to teach. Unknown partly because I’m not going to count and partly because there are a few variables such as: still scheduling students at the college. Still waiting to figure out the last couple of students. It’s been a busy week, but nothing too insane because it’s just teaching right now…this weekend I only have two little concerts in the evening, and then Monday is Labor Day which is off. After that, things really get heated up, and then the semester is in FULL SWING.
Weather wise, things are amazing right now. We are deep into false fall and it is terrific. I’ve been taking walks practically every day and it is just glorious. If we had weather like this all the time people from the coasts would be climbing over themselves to move here rather than pretending we didn’t exist (and after experiencing their interstate traffic, no thank you, please stay where you are, coastal people). But it is terrific while it lasts, and I am appreciative. I hope it lasts through the next weekend. Louie and I took advantage over the weekend and had a lovely bike ride on the Katy Trail and got pizza afterwards at the Good News Brewing Company.
We are hoping to get another bike ride in this weekend. We did a ton of biking on our recent trip so we are trying to keep up the biking. It’s hard to get out too much during the week but right now the weekend’s are doable, and with this false fall weather (it’s sort of a joke, but not really, we know fall isn’t really here yet) and gig season not being in full swing yet, we have to take advantage while we can.
We just got back from another fabulous road trip. Truthfully, Louie and I hadn’t set out on a good camping road trip in a few years, so we were glad to do so in the past few weeks. We’d forgotten how to do a few things, but it came back pretty quickly. I’ll tell you more about it in detail, but in a nutshell, we spent about a week visting my sister Leslie and her family in Chautauqua, New York and then we spent time driving through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, camping, hiking, getting bitten by mosquitoes, and buying maple syrup, before driving all the way home in two days.
So here I am, home again, sending out oodles of emails and trying to convince myself to finish folding laundry and get those last few things out of the car. Lessons start up again on Monday, and things are…mostly scheduled at home, and starting to get scheduled at the college. I have spent entirely too much time at the computer, but Muriel loves it because she sits by me, glad that I am home. Miles is less glad, because we turned the a/c down to a cooler temp and I think he prefers the hotter temperature. He does enjoy the pets I think, but less from me and much more from Louie.
It’s going to be a busy year, again, of course, as things always are. Each year starts full of promise though, right? It’s like the shiny school supplies, the new start, the freshness of the new semester beckons. We are rested, excited to begin. The weather promises to start cooling down and get nicer as the months go on, and we are getting into the fun holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are getting closer (but not TOO close.) And honestly, I had a terrific summer, and we were so lucky with the tornado missing our house, and other than hurting my ankle (did I mention that? I rolled my ankle in June pretty badly) it was a good summer…so many nice trips, the Alaska cruise, the girls trip to Wisconsin, a New England Road Trip, so many evenings free, so many lovely gigs that paid pretty well and some fun times with Louie and other friends. I feel like it was one of the better summers in a long time.
(Other than you know, the whole *waves arms around* world falling apart around us. But what can you do? We are determined to do what we CAN about that, while not letting it ruin our lives any more than it HAS to. We did notice that we saw no Canadian license plates while we were on our trip, even though I have read many places that usually Canadians like to drive over the border to vacation in New Hampshire and Maine. We did see a fair amount of Trump signs. Inflation was rampant. There were many places where I had checked prices and made notes in early summer as to what things would cost and the prices were already higher by mid-August. My dad suggested maybe I had written down the non-peak season prices, and maybe, I could have made that mistake once or twice, but I am pretty sure that I made notes of what they said prices would be for the summer, and they just raised prices. And that’s just one small thing, the thing we were told would be changed, the thing that we were told Americans cared about, that I’m not seeing anybody doing a damn thing about, but instead rounding up and torturing people of color and shipping them off to concentration camps instead. So, yeah, that puts a damper on things. )
But I’ll leave you with a few pictures of the cats, that our amazing cat sitter took and sent while I was gone.
I haven’t been as good with my blog post name titles but I’m pleased with myself today, you’re welcome.
Day 6: Ketchikan
We didn’t arrive in Ketchikan until 11 am, so we didn’t have to get up too early. We had a nice breakfast and then walked around the promenade and watched the ship come into Ketchikan.
It was a bit of a line getting off the ship–I think everybody was ready to leave all at once, and we were worried we would be late for our excursion, but we made it! We were the last to arrive though, but it was fine.
We signed up for a guided hike in a rainforest with a company called Tongass Teague. Originally we signed up for a longer hike which was more difficulty, but the guide (Tongass Teague himself) had gotten the flu and wasn’t up to guiding it, so he asked if we would be okay switching to a different hike with another guide. It made the hike a larger group than normal though, which at the time I agreed didn’t sound bad, but in practice was a little annoying as some of the people were quite slow. However, the guide was great and the hike was lovely–very easy, but lovely. Not to spoil it.
We drove in two cars to the other side of the island–yes, Ketchikan is on an island, and basically, we took the road to the end, and then parked and got out and walked. It was raining a bit, to be expected, because Ketchikan basically gets more rain than anywhere else in Alaska, with over 140 inches of rain per year. But it wasn’t raining hard. so it was fine with a rain coat and a hat. The hike was gorgeous, lush, all of that which we were growing to expect but also not expect, because, Alaska!
We basically hiked the entire time along this creek which was called Lunch Creek. We only hiked a little over a mile before turning back, and I think Louie and I would have loved to have gone further, but when you are on a cruise and need transportation and are on a tight schedule, you need a guided hike, so you do what you can.
The guide was great–I forget his name now, but he was very knowledgeable about the plants and told us a lot about them as well as the history of the area and many things like that. He said he had originally come to Ketchikan on a cruise and taken a hike with Tongass Teague and then decided to move to Ketchikan and work with him! Teague himself had been an English professor at a local university before working full time at the company. Tourism, as you would expect, is big business in Alaska.
We saw this angry mushroom. Don’t eat him, for sure.
And this weird looking slug or whatever.
At the halfway point, we stopped and enjoyed some hot tea before turning around and heading back. When we got back to practically the starting point, we then headed down to the ocean to see where the creek met the ocean.
Can you see Louie hiding?
Right there, there is where it meets the ocean!
It was a gorgeous scene! There was a campground and picnic area there. It made me want to come back and camp for awhile, though I would also be afraid of bears–when the salmon are running later in the season (not in May but later in the summer) I’m sure the bears are around.
We also saw several seals.
I believe you can see them in this photo. Maybe.
One more before we left.
Then it was back to the vans and back to the town.
After the hike, we were pretty hungry. It was cold and rainy, but I wanted to walk around town a bit. We took advice from the guide and got some food at the Alaska Fish House first. We both got fish and rice bowls with salmon, because it seemed like salmon was the thing to eat there, I think.
And then we walked over to Creek Street, which was a street built on a creek. It was pretty deserted, I guess because it was cold and rainy!
We walked up to see the fish ladder as well.
And then it was easy to find the ship! It was all downhill from there, actually. Literally.
I would say that it is possible that we went in the hot tub after that to warm up, but I don’t actually recall. Let’s put it as a strong maybe, because I was cold and wet, and that would have been very nice! Either way, you can guess what we did before dinner: watched the trio!
Dinner was fun then: it was a special “gala dinner!”
That night the ship started getting very…rocky. We were hitting some rough seas leaving Ketchikan! And it was also the night of the chocolate surprise, I believe. We went to a bar with Ben and Roz after dinner for a drink and at some point, a bunch of the staff starting walking through with trays of various chocolate goodies calling out “chocolate surprise” and giving out various chocolate goodies and making us take them! We were stuffed but tried a few things anyway: most were various cereals or nuts dipped in chocolate and were of course tasty.
Above: the room where the classical trio played.
We stayed up later than normal, but I was exhausted, and by the time I went to bed, the ship was visibly rocking and I had to hold on to the sink to brush my teeth! I suppose it helped us sleep well haha!
Elephant towel animal.
Picture outside the elevators on our floor.
Day 7: Day at Sea
We actually did sleep in a little bit, because breakfast wasn’t served until later: it was a special Alaskan brunch. I think we just got coffee at the coffee shop instead for a fee. We wanted to go walk around the promenade and look for wildlife but…it was closed due to the waves and high winds!
So we just chilled out for a bit, until we went to a program in the theater about how the ship works, something about a city within the ship, and how they feed everybody, how the water systems and electricity works, how they deal with the waste, and it was really quite interesting.
And then we went and got brunch. There were some good things and some other things we didn’t love as much, but overall it was nice. We chatted with some nice people as usual: we always met interesting people when we sat with them, though usually everybody was older and usually they had been on something like a dozen to 4 dozen cruises, haha!
After brunch, since we couldn’t walk on the promenade, we thought, well, maybe we can go in the hot tub. We weren’t sure, but we thought we would check it out. We got to the top and indeed, it seemed open. The pool deck was a bit crazy though: the pool was definitely dangerous: the waves in the pool were intense–it was unclear if it was officially closed, but nobody was in it, and that was a good idea, but the hot tub seemed perfectly safe unless you were particularly afraid of falling–the ship was still rocking but we weren’t terribly afraid of falling, and once you were seated in the tub, the waves in it were just an inch or two.
We ended up staying in the hot tub for over two hours. You might think, that sounds dangerous, but it wasn’t that hot. We were about to get out at one point but then somebody new got in and we started chatting with them and it was very interesting. It was a fun and relaxing afternoon!
After that, the waves finally settled down and the promenade deck was opened up again, so we were able to venture out.
We spent the afternoon just chilling out and of course, having to do a bit of packing. And then of course, one last evening with the trio, and we asked the cellist to join us for a drink after dinner, which she agreed.
The ship had a lot of interesting artwork.
We enjoyed our last dinner aboard the ship, and the servers sang a goodbye song as well. Then we met Annie for a drink and chatted with her about her life and life aboard the ship, and then we went to sleep.
Day 8: Headed home
We got up and had one last breakfast aboard. We did meet Ben and Roz for this as well. It was a more limited menu but still very nice. Unlike previous cruises we didn’t feel as rushed to leave and everybody was still very polite–in the past I had felt that as soon as you woke up on the last day people suddenly stopped being so kind and polite and just sort of pushed you off the ship, and this one they continued being nice until the very end. So that was great. We then disembarked and said goodbye the Zaandam and Holland America.
We found the SkyTrain and took it the Airport. We made our flight with PLENTY of time: we had a flight at noon and we had plenty of time to waste. Too much, probably, it was a boring day. But we made it home safely. And we would recommend Holland again.
After I had gotten the bug in my head about going to Alaska, one thing I kept seeing was “get a route that goes to Glacier Bay National Park”. And I was like, how does a ship go to a National Park. Well, today we would find out.
Day 5: Glacier Bay National Park. Not to be confused with Glacier Bay toilets, sold at Home Depot.
We had attended a talk the previous day I guess about what to expect at Glacier Bay, but it was still sort of confusing, but we figured we would figure it out as we went along. Early in the morning some park rangers were going to board the ship AS WE WERE MOVING and then we would be going up into the Park, and then at some point stopping, turning around, and then headed back. Very exciting. Lots to see. This was the day that people said you would really want your balcony but Louie and I figured we would just have to be out on the decks with the other commoners.
We had thought we might wake up to see the rangers board at 6 am but we did not. Oh, and that is a picture of the daily newspaper we got every night for the next day. There was also an app with all the information–even without buying wifi you could use the app and you could also use the app to message other guests on the ship.
It was a foggy morning. Louie and I started the morning walking around the promenade deck outside–it was cold and brisk, the coldest day yet.
A good view of the promenade deck.
There was a real buzz in the air, as we were in the National Park and it was to be an exciting day!
At some point, they started making announcements and talking over the speakers, pointing out interesting features and animals and telling us what we were seeing. Everything was so large and some things were very far away, it was nearly impossible to understand the scale of things. A mountain might seem small and right near you and then you would realize that was actually over a mile away, or more. We would look with binoculars and realized we were looking at tiny specks that were Dall sheep.
It’s kind of hard to tell, but this was the first glacier we saw.
As we got further into the park, we slowed down and the water definitely changed quality: it looked much more icy. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t that clear, it was cloudy and a bit rainy.
Look, a glacier! And look at the color of the water at this point. It was surreal. This was Margerie Glacier, I believe.
We ran into Ben and Roz on the bow. It was crowded out there, and that’s where they started serving pea soup, which was a highlight of the day. Then it started raining, cold rain, and people started scattering until Louie and I were practically the only ones left.
It looked like you could reach out and touch it, but it was still over a mile away. The captain opened up the bow of the ship so we could go out and see from the front. He stopped the ship and we slowly turned around 180 degrees.
If you squint, you can see there is a seal on the ice floe in the middle of that photo above.
This looks different, so it must have been the Johns Hopkins Glacier.
Anyway, we started heading back south again after all of that, and eventually we went in to eat lunch, which I sort of regret in a way, because the water was looking so amazing and then by after lunch it was looking normal again, but oh well, it was also late in the day and either way we were heading south, lunch or no lunch!
Somebody was out in a sailboat!
And then we watched the park rangers leave the ship. They got onto a smaller boat, while the ships were moving. It was fairly exciting.
After that we decided we needed to warm up a bit so we hit the hot tub for a bit before our classical trio concert and dinner. Tonight’s dinner would be a bit different: we were going to the specialty restaurant called Morimoto by the Sea.
Louie ate an entire fish! The meal was nice, but we ended up feeling like it was overrated. We definitely overordered, and some things were very good and others not as much. In retrospect we would have been happy just to go to the regular dining room and saved the upcharge, and there weren’t any windows in the restaurant, which we also missed. It was dark by the time we got out of dinner!
And thus ended Day 5, Glacier Bay Day.
One more Blog Post to go. I’ll finish up my next post with Days 6 and 7 and then disembarkment. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments and I’ll answer them in the next post as well!
Day 3: I left off with our lunch, and then it was time to get off the ship in the capital of Alaska, Juneau.
As a kid, one of the ways we entertained ourselves on long car rides was by my brother Jesse quizzing us on random trivia from the almanac. No, I’m not making this up. This was before things like “screen time” and we took some LONG road trips, so he would quiz us on largest cities and state and world capitals, so rest assured I knew my state capitals very well, at least at the time. So I knew that Juneau was the capital of Alaska, but what the almanac didn’t tell us was that you couldn’t drive there! You could only get there by plane or by ship, isn’t that crazy?
Louie and I disembarked, which was a very smooth and easy process, and we got our first look at the Zaandam from the outside–we never got a look at it in Vancouver, so this was fun for me.
We had a very short amount of time to wander before we needed to meet our van for the whale watching tour–we had booked one with Ben and Roz and we were very excited. I had not seen whales before though Louie had.
We saw a few other ships docked, including a giant one from Royal Caribbean, the Quantum of the Seas, which held over 4000 passengers and made the Zaandam look tiny. And a couple that were even smaller than ours and I assume more luxurious. (“Far more luxurious”).
Then we met our van and drove about 20-30 minutes to the dock to get our boat for whale watching. We went with Jayleen’s Whale Watching to see whales. It was a bit of a splurge, but whale watching seemed fairly expensive to begin with so I thought a small boat seemed pretty cool and we would have a better chance of seeing whales that way, and we got more time in the water with a smaller boat. I also liked that it was a woman owned company, though our guide was a man…he had a woman boss 🙂
Louie had a long lens for wildlife photos and hasn’t shared any of them with for this blog post yet, but he got a bunch of bald eagle pictures. Juneau was littered with bald eagles, we saw dozens on our drive and there was one just hanging out on top of a post at the pier.
As you can see, the scenery was just awful.
But the weather wasn’t actually great, it was a bit rainy and foggy, which did plague us all week. We managed though. As they say in Norway, det finnes ikke dÃ¥rlig vær, bare dÃ¥rlig klær! (there’s never bad weather, only bad clothing). Anyway that picture is the Mendenhall Glacier from a distance.
The sea lions liked to hang out on the buoys, apparently.
We spend the afternoon watching whales and it was quite amazing. It was five of us on the boat with the guide/driver/captain (just one person).
Anyway, iphone pictures aren’t the best, but you get the idea. Whales!
On the drive back, we saw a bear on the side of the road and watched for a bit.
We could have spent a little more time in Juneau after the tour but we were all cold and wet and decided to go back to the ship and get warmed up instead, and met up for dinner afterwards.
This picture was from inside one of the ladies’ rooms right near the dining room to show the men how fancy it was. Nice views as well!
We didn’t take off until after dinner–we could have had dinner in Juneau, but we decided to save the money and eat on the ship which was perfectly fine. I know people said the crab in Juneau was really good though, but I think we felt a bit overwhelmed by the rain and the intense tourism right by the ship, haha. We probably should have gone further in, but nonetheless we loved our whale watching tour!
And we had a great night of desserts!
Day 4: Skagway
The next day was an early start for a full day in Skagway. Louie and I were signed up for a ship’s excursion. We started with room service breakfast to get an early start.
I wanted to take it privately but the company only offered it through the ship on Saturdays for some reason, so that’s what we did. The excursion was called Chilkoot Trail Hike and Float. We met them quite early in the morning, around 8:15 am, and we weren’t sure what sort of group to expect, but it ended up just being around 6 people plus the guide, named Kat, so that was great.
We started out driving a bit, away from the town and towards the old town of Dyea and the Chilkoot Trail, which used to be a very popular route to Canada (back in the gold rush days.) This is part of why I chose this excursion, I liked the historical aspect of it as well as the opportunity to hike as well as spend some time on a raft.
Similar to Vancouver, everything was very lush, but the mountains were much bigger! Though if the skies were clearer, the snow capped mountains would likely be more pronounced. Everywhere we looked the scenery was amazing though, and you should know that my pictures don’t do this justice by any means.
Kat was a great guide, and she taught us about various plants as we went as well as making sure we were all keeping up and helping us over various obstacles. She was well trained and energetic and loved the outdoors and Alaska.
The hike was a lot of fun, and then we got to board a raft and Kat guided us down the river.
We all had to put on tall rubber boots and lift vests. Kat told us if you got water over the top of your boots it was called a “bootie” and her colleagues teased her the first few days of river raft school when this would happen to her. She was very tough: she was short and petite, but took of all us down the river in a raft all by herself. She said the rafts can hold up to 10. The group was very nice and enjoyed listening and also just observing the surroundings.
Somebody was camping in a van down by the river.
The orange is where we hiked and then the blue is the river we floated back down to, basically. When we got back some of Kat’s colleagues were there to help haul the raft out and pull it up over a bank, and they were all equally strong women and I loved it, though I also felt like a weak and pathetic women in comparison. Oh well, I have my skills, plus I am like, totally older and am somewhat strong. Definitely argumentative. They work for a woman owned company as well. We were offered hot cocoa but just as soon as Louie and I made our cocoa we were hustled onto the van so we spent the first part of the bumpy ride trying not to spill hot cocoa all over ourselves, so we would recommend against the hot cocoa, or would have asked for like, three minutes to drink it. Our only complaint about what was otherwise an amazing excursion.
We made it back to Skagway around 12:30 and we were hungry, so we went to the Skagway Brewery Company for lunch. It was crowded and super expensive–over $20 for a fish sandwich! But we enjoyed our meal, and Louie had a spruce tip ale, which is a special kind of beer they make in Skagway from the spruce tips, which can fend off scurvy.
A house of negotiable affection: there were historically many of these in Alaska.
After lunch, we went on a short hike just out of town. Yakutania Point and Smugglers Cove, which was just about 1 to 1.5 miles in length.
I think we had some of the best scenery on this short hike. It kept going further but we really didn’t have time to explore, and didn’t really know where it went either. We headed back to the town after the hike and split a pretzel and Louie tried another spruce tip beer at the Klondike Brewing Company before we meandered back to the ship to get there in time for the all-aboard. Oh, and we had a wonderful time watching a bald eagle fly around for awhile too.
In addition to the National Historical Trail there is a National Historical Park in Skagway. The Visitor’s Center was closed but we saw some of the exhibits. They mostly seemed to be centered around the prostitution at the time. I’m not certain that shows the US in a good light, should I report it to someone at the state department, does anyone still work there?
By Day 4 you start to have a great affinity for your home, the Zaandam and work hard to get a great picture with it and the mountains in the background.
And then, Louie and got showered and hurried to watch the classical trio perform. By now we also wanted to chat with the cellist to say hello as I realized both of my sisters knew her, so we had a connection (seriously, the classical music world is SO SMALL.). Which made it even more fun to watch!
Skagway was our farthest point north on this trip and as such, it was still light as we sailed away, and late into the evening.
Tomorrow would be a big day: Glacier Bay National Park!
