Day 12

I’m writing this from a boat in the middle of silvery-blue-green ocean, surrounded by Glacier National Park.

Even typing it seems unbelievable. I felt the same way when we took our trip to the Florida Keys in April, when I was scuba diving off the coast on a reef with my sister. We have been very, very blessed with our vacations this year. I feel like we have really needed them, but so far they’ve been above and beyond what I could have expected.

The scenery this morning was utterly beautiful…

Written much later…

On this day we woke up knowing we were going to be docking in Haines, Alaska, which was our stop , in just a few hours. That’s why I decided it would be okay for Timothy to wake us all up at 5:30. Believe it or not, no one else really supported that decision. Haha.

We soaked in the scenery, the atmosphere, and just the overall cool-ness of being on the ferry, knowing we were almost done. John especially did not want to leave the boat.

Eventually we had to, though, and we took our stuff down to the cardeck, loaded it into our truck, and then waited for it to be our turn to pull the truck off of the cardeck, drive up a ramp, and continue our trip to Alaska.

We drove past the Chilkat (I think?) River preserve where there are supposed to be bald eagles, but they’d missed the memo, sadly. Actually it was just the wrong time of year.

Crossing the border into Canada went well, this was a very low-key crossing. From there we drove deep into the mountains into a wilderness that’s just so unique in it’s beauty. It’s incredibly vast and isolated and (I know I keep saying this…) beautiful. We also got to see a bear.

There is; however, no where to stop. Nowhere. Except a couple of towns, which we didn’t reach for hours. So we had lunch around three in the afternoon, which is how we were able to convince my mom to let us drive pretty late. We made it all the way to Beaver Creek, Canada, about twenty miles from the U.S. border, and spent the night.