Thursday, July 26, 2018

We Went To Alaska!

June 8th was our 10 year anniversary!  It's so hard to believe it has been that long and we have weathered many storms together.  I thank God that He chose Jake to let me do life with.  
We celebrated by taking a cruise to Alaska!  It has always been a dream of ours and our amazing travel agent, Megan Rokey, helped us make it a reality.  Seriously, she was amazing.  Please use her if you need a travel agent.  (NOT a paid advertisement, just an incredibly happy customer)
This is going to be a really condensed version.  We took over 1000 pictures between the two of us.

We flew to Seattle and spent a little time there before we boarded the Ruby Princess and embarked for Alaska.
We seriously had the best sunrises and sunsets in Alaska.  Pictures hardly do them justice.

We hiked to the Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls in Juneau.



If you ever get to Skagway, AK make sure you look for their doughboys!

Chilkoot Lake in Haines, AK

We decided our relationship hadn't been tested enough in the last 10 years, so we chose to kayak together.  LOL- though I wasn't LOL'ing in the midst of the challenge.

What a beauty!

Sunrises happened around 4:30 am.  It was so worth it to catch this one.

Glacier Bay National Park was one of my favorite stops.  The views were spectacular!

One request Jake had when we booked the trip was to go fishing.  So we hit up salmon fishing in Ketchikan.  This was a highlight for him.

Working on bringing in his king salmon.  You are only allowed to catch 1 per year, so he limited out rather quickly.  Our guide told us that if we were commercial fisherman, this fish was worth $500.00.  It sells for around $25.00 per pound on the open market.



These are similar to the doughboys in Skagway, but are called BeaverTails in Victoria, British Columbia.  Victoria was a beautiful town with gorgeous flowers and cute little house boats.  It was our last port of call before we headed back to Seattle to fly home.

In Victoria, they light up their capital building every night and it is simply gorgeous.

We would love to go back someday and go further into Alaska.  We saw whales, orcas, porpoises, sea otters, etc. but no moose or bears.  We would love to see more land and wildlife of Alaska.

Our kiddos stayed with my parents in Iowa and they really enjoyed spending time with Grandpa & Grandma and their cousins!  Hope you are all having a great summer and school is right around the corner!  Z & K are starting to get excited!  K has been excited for the last month and Z is starting to get excited about lunch and recess.  Oh well!  Typical boy, right?