Days 13-15

I'm going to combine some days in the next couple of posts, just so you're not overloaded with posts, and then I'll try to start doing daily posts again.

On day 13 we woke up in Canada, ready to be back on American soil. We left a little late, but we were gaining a hour going back into Alaska. We got into Alaska about half an hour after we left and drove through gorgeous Alaskan scenery. We ate an early lunch that night at Fast Eddy’s in Tok, which is one of my favorite pizza places ever. From there we drove through Glennallen, then headed towards south central Alaska. The road from just north of Palmer and Wasilla is incredible—it’s on the side of a mountain, literally built into it—and provides an incredible view of some glaciers and rivers. Rivers in Georgia, at least where we are from, are relatively lazy. Sure, they flow…but not too fast at all. They’re also usually muddy brown.

These rivers are grey-ish (from glacier silt, I think), and so fast and powerful. They water looks thick, like melted silver, and angry as it tosses against underwater rocks and creates rapids. There’s something about it that I can hardly look away from. It’s utterly captivating.

The Matanuska-Susitna Valley is one of my favorite places on earth, because the mountains are so close and tall. The peaks are jagged and rugged here, not softer like most of the mountains around Anchorage appear from the city.

We arrived in Anchorage that night at the Krafts’ house, friends of ours for way more than twenty years. Their house feels like another home to me (and not just because we lived here for a month when I was in high school and we’d just moved up). It was so good to see them again.

On day 14 we decided our large family needed to split up so my parents went off with a friend for the day and John and I took the boys to the zoo. I love the Alaska Zoo here in Anchorage. The animals have such large homes there, and the gravel path that leads around the zoo to the different exhibits is through the woods so it all feels very natural. The zoo is somewhere I came a lot when I was a kid, so it was really special to share that with the boys.

On day 15 we went to Hatcher Pass and Independence Mine which is back in the Mat-Su Valley (see day 13). You have to drive up, up, up into the mountains and a mountain stream winds by the road. John speculated as to how they dyed it to get it that perfect color blue. Haha. It really was incredible though. I’m not sure if I got a picture or if I was too busy looking. Timothy was really grumpy once we got to the mine (I’d forgotten his puppy stuffed animal…oops.), but we hiked around anyway, enjoyed the history of a decades old gold mine. Many of the buildings have fallen, but some are still standing and are being restored and used as part of the park (state park, I think?). The views from above the mine were beautiful. We could see down into the valley, and the mountains all around us that we were in the middle of were beautiful too—vibrant green and rocky. I think Scotland must look very similar to this area of Alaska. Maybe that’s why I feel so at home there—my ancestry? Or maybe I just like it.

This far into the mountains there was still a little bit of snow in patches, still, so we crossed a mountain stream and hiked over to one of the patches and let the boys play on it. While Timothy had fun (finally!) sledding on his rain jacket down the snow from me to my mom, John played mountain goat and conquered some boulders, and my dad walked around with Josh (who eventually wanted to sled too). 

We were all pretty soaked and cold by the time we finished. I teased my mom and feeling warm and sleepy (hypothermia, anyone?), but we made it back to the Krafts’ house and took warm showers, and then ate a delicious salmon dinner. Love salmon…

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.

Day 11

This morning we docked in Ketchikan to let some passengers off and pick up more. I took the boys out onto the back deck to see the town as we approached, and we got to watch several float planes land and take off very  close to the ferry. The boys loved it and Josh didn’t even mind the noise. I think this trip has been as good for him as it has been for me.

We bumped against the dock so gently that I didn’t feel it and then tied us up. We were able to disembark in town, which came as a pleasant surprise to me, so we made a run for the grocery store to pick up more food for Josh. Because of his allergies and the desolateness of the area where we are, I’m not entirely comfortable trusting someone in a kitchen unaccustomed to making allergy modifications with his safety, so we’ve been feeding him food we’ve packed. We got some essentials there, including a pack of Oreos, and I was reminded by the prices of the fact that everything has to be shipped up here. It kinda makes me wish I’d packed peaches to hand out to people up here so they could taste what fresh fruit was meant to be…

Although I guess this is Day 10, so they wouldn’t have been any fresher than what they normally get, so nevermind on that.

The water changed colors sometime on the morning of Day 10, or maybe even the night before. It has been a beautiful dark gunmetal grey, almost black when the wind whips it into waves, and now it’s the color of glacial silt—a silvery-blue-grey that almost glows. It’s still stunning, but it’s amazing to me how the color could change so drastically in a matter of hours, when the water is so deep.

After lunch I took a nap with the boys and woke up when we docked in Wrangell. No one planned to get out there, because it was less than an hour long stop. I didn’t hear the announcement from our room, but John told me later that the man on the loudspeaker told them that Wrangell is where they lose the most people (who get off and don’t make it back on in time), and told them not to worry, it was an easy flight to Petersburg (a stop about four hours away by ferry), and that they could always meet us there.

I don’t think we lost anyone. Don’t worry. Haha.

When we eventually got up from our naps, we went up to the viewing lounge to watch the boat navigate through the Wrangell Narrows. Y’all, you seriously would not believe the small space this huge ferry can fit through. John just kept staring and saying “I don’t know where this boat thinks it’s going!” because it literally looked like we’d reached a dead end—there was water ahead of us, but with all of the markers and rocky islands in the middle of it, it really didn’t look navigatable.

 I knew it was, though, because I’ve been through them before. Last time we went through at night, though, so it was an entirely different experience. We watched from the viewing room as we passed by green and red blinking lights and a man read us a poem called “The Wrangell Narrows at Night.” I can vaguely remember having been nervous about them that first time, but they turned into something special and magical as I watched the blinking lights out the window in a hushed room full of people listening to that poem. I’ve been looking forward to going back through them ever since.

This time we passed through in the daytime, which was a fun new experience for me. At times the boat is so close to shore that I feel like even the worst swimmer could have jumped from the boat and made it to shore without any effort at all.

After spending some time watching from the front (inside) we moved to a side deck. We were the only ones on the deck at the time, which made it even more special. Somewhere in the middle of the narrows we started to see houses. Houses! What a cool place to live. There were actually a decent number of them, like a very spread out neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. We waved to the people who were outside watching the ferry go by, especially the kids we saw jumping up and down on their front porch. They looked about Joshua’s age—how fun to grow up in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness!

We took pictures of the houses and after not too long they got even closer together. We saw a group of people crowded onto the porch of one cabin and then they shot off fireworks! It was so cool because I had just been thinking that I was a little disappointed to have missed fourth of July fireworks (I did see one on the 3^rd, but one doesn’t really count), and they shot off somewhere between five and ten for us, right from their deck overlooking the water! We watched, laughed, and enjoyed them.

Even more than the fireworks, John enjoyed the eagles. He’d seen one a little while before and looked at it for a while through his binoculars, but when the fireworks went off about six of them flew out of where they’d been sitting in the tree tops. I thought he was going to burst from excitement.

Day 10!

Amazingly enough, the rocking seemed to help with everyone’s sleep and we all got tons of rest. Until 4:30 when Timothy decided to get up. Now normally I would have made him go back to sleep, but when I checked my phone I thought it was 5:30, because while we weren’t technically on Alaska time yet, the boat was. So I discovered after we’d been walking around the boat for a little while that I let him get up at 4:30. Ooops.

It’s hard to be too sorry about that, though, because it worked out well. Most of the passengers were still sleeping while Timothy and I made our way up and down staircases and eventually ended up at the back deck area of the ferry. From there we stood alone in the chilly morning wind and I just…absorbed. The mountains, the calm of the water, the fact that we are going to Alaska…All of it. Those early morning hours go down as one of my favorite parts of the trip so far.

Breakfast in the dining room when it eventually opened was delicious, and then I headed back down to the room with the boys so that Josh could rest with a movie and Timothy could take a nap (since he’d been up for hours). I wanted to be outside for our first open water crossing (aka when the ferry rocks like a teeny little boat on big waves…okay, I’m 100% exaggerating, but that’s what it feels like), partially because I’m less nervous outside in the fresh air, and partially because I get slightly queasy during these sections and I know being outside makes me feel better. I figured this was good timing for a nap since according to the time chart in the dining room, we had another few hours before we reached it.

Five minutes, five minutes after I had Timothy soundly asleep and was therefore stuck in the room, the captain announced our first open water crossing.

Ahem. Seriously???

I wrote in my notebook that motherhood is knowing you get seasick and staying inside your cabin during an open water crossing anyway because your exhausted one year old just fell asleep…

I spent the next hour a half of the crossing alternating between looking out the window, checking on the boys to make sure they didn’t roll out of bed (haha), praying, and looking up Bible verses about fear. The cool thing about the open water crossing at Queen Charlotte Sound was how much it taught me about faith and trust and the ways I sometimes don’t exercise those. Faith when you’re in control? Not really faith…Something to think about.

The shoreline was beautiful even during this bumpy part of the voyage—beautiful rugged coastline with jagged rocky shores dotted by dark evergreens.

After that open water crossing ended, we ate lunch in the snack bar, wandered around a little, then I took the kids back for a nap again. They took wonderful naps and I think I took a little of one too. I woke up with the realization that this was an adventure and I was really having fun! I was determined to enjoy the rest of our journey and not waste time worrying.

Cue Open Water Crossing #2. (And hear the “bahahahaha” in the background).

They announced it while Josh was still sleeping (though Timothy had woken up), so I thought I would be stuck in the room again. Thankfully Josh woke up quickly so we were able to leave the room and try to find a better place to watch what was going on.

This one, while shorter, was much rougher than the first had been and we had a hard time walking around the ship. Watching from the front observation lounge was…intense because we could really see how high the front of the boat would go before it crashed down onto the dark waves again. I was still looking for John (and for a better spot) so we walked all over the ship. Eventually we decided on the side deck near our cabin, which was a good place to watch. From there I was able to enjoy the view, like the way the dark water almost looks like liquid steel, and the way the seafoam really is an earie, glowing light green underneath the white sudsey part you see at first.

I was calming down when I felt Timothy (who was in the baby carrier) tense like he needed to throw up. That’s when I noticed that he was cold, clammy, and slightly green. I tried to get him to watch the horizon and he hung in there until the crossing was over. From there I took him down to the room to watch Thomas as his reward for hiking all over the boat with his mommy who didn’t realize her baby might get seasick.

John hung out with the boys in the room this time and I spent a lot of time on one of the side decks, sitting on a metal pylon that’s probably really for rope and not for use as a bench, talking with my parents and enjoying the scenery. We watched mountain islands rise out of the cloudy mist and I realized that the clouds up here are different than the clouds anywhere else that I have seen. They seem almost to come from the mountain side itself, and they’re entirely ethereal looking, more silver than grey. Sitting there just watching, taking pictures, was one of the most relaxing parts of the trip.

Here are some of the ones I took...

Dinner on Day 10 was delicious—I had salmon—and we watched out the window as we passed the beautiful Canadian coastline. I don’t get why more people don’t live out here. I know it’s isolated and there are no utilities on random islands, but it’s so beautiful and people don’t see it as often as I feel like land like this deserves to be seen. I think that’s part of what captivates me about this part of the world—there is so much beauty that it’s not…overly popular. I’m not sure how to explain that other than to say we passed over ten beautiful waterfalls yesterday, and none of them are famous. None of them had huge crowds (or any crowds) around them. It makes you feel like you might be the only one who has ever gasped at the beauty of a particular waterfall, or noted the way it cascades down an entire seaside mountain. It’s like God made this part of creation for you. It’s beautiful and personal while it’s isolated.

Such a land of contrasts. That’s why I love it.