Friday, July 26th-Glaciers!

Caleb had to work so Sara, Claire, and Ryan flew to Anchorage to spend a week seeing part of Alaska with us. Today we saw glaciers! We went on a glacier cruise from Whittier. It’s over on Prince William sound through that weird one lane train-truck-car tunnel.  Anyway, the boat is a high speed catamaran that covered 140 miles in 5 hours. You go up these inlets called the College and Harriman Fjords. We saw orcas, sea lions, one bald eagle, a large nest of sea otters and a LOT of glaciers. Claire and Ryan were appointed Junior Rangers by the Park Service Ranger who is on board to narrate the trip. Diana, Sara, and I had Glacier Ice Margaritas so a good time was had by all. Here are a few pics for you to kinda get the idea:

Of all the glaciers we saw, the star of the show was the Surprise Glacier up the Harriman Fjord. We’d seen videos of glaciers calving but to see it in person is an outta the world experience. I was surprised to hear a shotgun-like blast when the chunk of ice broke away from the glacier. All in all, it was a very enjoyable day with Sara and the kids!
It took me 71 years to ever see a Bald Eagle in the wild!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Saturday, October 26-Good News and Bad News About Lake Tahoe!

Image
We got to Lake Tahoe about dark-30 on Friday night. We drove through Truckee (on the CA side) down to the lake and then around the Nevada side to Zephyr Cove RV Park. We’re about four miles North of Stateline. First the good news: Lake Tahoe is a gift! The water is almost as blue as the water in Crater Lake but LT is much bigger. The lake is roughly rectangular with the dimensions being roughly ten by twenty miles. Everyone who has ever been here has a favorite part of the lake. The favorite part of LT for Diana and I has always been the area around Emerald Bay. Here are a couple of pics: Now for the bad news: I took a pretty nasty fall. I’m okay but here’s a quick summary: I have a broken right thumb and the orthopedic surgeon put a pin in it, with a couple of stitches, so it will heal correctly. My left knee has a hairline fracture so it’s immobilized with a flexbrace. Several stitches in my head and that pretty much does it. Look at the rocks at the bottom of the lower pic
Read more

Welcome to Mike and Diana Griffith's RV Life Blog!

Image
Welcome to our new blog! We invite you to follow us as we travel throughout the USA and Canada in our Durango fifth-wheel. We'll be sharing the highlights and pictures of our travels on this blog.  Rather than retiring in the usual sense, here is a short summary of our retirement plans:  We've already sold our home in Kingwood, TX.  We currently live in our RV in an RV Park North of Kingwood. This means we went from 2560 SF to 335 SF! Now THAT was a real challenge! We'll be updating this blog about the RV in the future.  We plan to leave here about the middle of May. We're going to the Dallas area to see our daughter and her family for a while. Then North to ALASKA! We will probably spend 3-4 weeks getting there because 1) we're retired and 2) we want to go to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and a few National Parks in Utah and Montana on the way. After exploring Alaska, we'll be headed back to Banff and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rockies. We
Read more

Tues, Dec 1, 2020-Petrified Forest National Park

Image
We expected to spend an hour or two at PFNP but we found it so unique we spent all day. We went there thinking there would see some hand sized pieces of petrified wood but were we wrong! We saw forests of petrified wood! Here’s a sample of some of the sizes of these trees now turned to crystal: The process of trees turning into rocks is a fascinating one. Several million years, when this area of NE Arizona was covered by a massive swamp, these giant trees fell into water. Over a few million more years, sediment covered the trees so they were preserved. Fast forward a few more million years and the atoms in the trees crystallized into petrified wood. The colors they crystallize into vary from red to orange to yellow to blue to gray to white to you name it. Here are a couple of pics of the colors of petrified trees: These two pics describes the large reddish polished sample above.  I set my wedding ring on this tree to give it some perspective Here’s a pic of my Bride with Dottie at the
Read more