Alaska!!

My sweet hubby turned 29 last weekend! A few months ago I told him to take off the week after his birthday because I was going to take him on a birthday surprise vacation. I'm pretty sure he had a good idea of where we were going since we had been talking about doing it for a while. Sunday morning (his birthday) I gave him a book of hikes in Alaska to go along with our tickets for an Alaskan Cruise!!! A few hours later we were loading up on one of the cruise ships that we see docked in Seattle all the time. When we got to our room, Ryan had another fun surprise. I had them decorate our room with happy birthday decorations! It made the week even more festive! After dropping off all our stuff we headed up to the top deck for the departing party. It just happened to be an absolutely gorgeous day in Seattle, so we soaked up some sun while sitting out having drinks delivered to us...divine! With a little dance party in the background we watched Seattle float out of sight and our cruise had begun!

Day 2 of the cruise was an at sea day, so we spent the day relaxing on board and checking out the amenities. Before we got on the cruise, we were fairly well prepared to be hanging out with a lot of much older people. What we were slightly more taken aback about was the overwhelming about of obesity on the ship! I guess it makes sense with the immense amount of food on board and no real need to be active if you didn't want to. I think this motivated us even more to hit the gym daily and be as active as possible in each of the ports! Anyway, back to day 2. We went to a few of the events and checked out several of the bars throughout the day. That evening was formal night, yay! I love a good excuse to get all dressed up! Of course we got the obligatory cruise photo done that night too. 

Day 3 was our first port stop in Juneau. We didn't really know what to expect in any of the towns, but we were able to find hikes within walking distance of the port in each of the places. About a mile outside of Juneau we were able to start hiking up a mountain. There were amazing views everywhere, and we actually got to see and hear several avalanches on the mountains around us. We didn't end up making it all the way to the end of the hike since if became covered in snow, but we made it pretty far in and really enjoyed the surrounding mountain views and just the fact that we were hiking through Alaska!

After we came down from the mountains we still had a little time to kill in Juneau so we walked around the town for a bit and ended up in a little hole in the wall pub with some pretty awesome live country music. It went quite nicely with the reindeer sausage pizza we got too! 

Day 4...Skagway! Again we spent most of the time in port hiking up the surrounding mountains. Again we had to turn around before we really wanted to because we got stuck in the snow. We actually hiked for a while this time through the snow but towards the top it got really foggy to the point that we couldn't see very far in front of us and we kept hearing avalanches a little too close for comfort, so we figures we should call it a day. Highlight of this little hike though, WE SAW A BEAR!! It was my first time seeing a bear in the wild. We were actually on our way down from the hike and a pretty good sized black bear was just trotting in the opposite direction about 50 ft from the path. Unfortunately I didn't pull my camera out quite fast enough to snap a shot before in disappeared into the forest again. It was awesome though and if I didn't know that it could seriously injure me, I would think it was super cute and cuddly looking! Awesomely enough my mom had just told me the day before that she ran into a bear on a hike in Tennessee. Apparently this was the week for our family to run into bears!

The view at the top.

Day 5...another at sea day. No getting off the boat today, but oh my goodness, the views! This day we spent cruising through glacier bay, as in surrounded by glaciers. That's so awesome! We got to the end of the bay area and just sat there for about and hour soaking in the views. It just happened to be a perfectly sunny day that day too, so it was spectacular. We saw a little more wild life too including whales, otters, and mountain goats. The glaciers and mountains definitely took the cake though. We even got to see a few pieces crack off of the glaciers and fall into the water. 

Day 6 was in Ketchikan! We actually only had the morning in port so we had to get up bright and early to get out hike in before the ship took off again. We did the same thing, found a hike withint walking distance from downtown and spent a few hours hiking up a mountain until we ran into too much snow to go any further. When we were done we walked around the town for a little bit before boarding the ship again for a relaxing rest of the day.

Our last stop of the cruise was to Victoria, BC. We were in port there for a few hours in the evening. We had been there once before when I went to run the marathon, so there wasn't anything new we were dying to see. We just walked around the town for a couple of hours and came back to the ship for the last night of entertainment. 

Sunday morning we woke up back in Seattle. We had some breakfast delivered and packed up to be out of our room by 9. It was really nice not having to make any other travel plans to get home and just jump in a taxi and be home in 5 minutes. One more thing we can check off our list now, the Alaskan Cruise! Awesome time!