We were just looking at this bird over there

One of our technicians did an install in a house on the bay (I'm not sure which bay. Everyone around here just refers to all of the water surrounding Juneau as "the bay") and this home had great big windows on the back of it so they had a wonderful view of the ocean.  The technician reported that in the course of his installation duties he saw some whales out in "the bay".  Glorious!  When we finally got a sunny day we went out to that general area along the shore to see what we could see. 

The tide was quite low so we saw lots of muscles and barnacles.  

                                                         

The wind was blowing and it was quite chilly so we walked along the forest path just above the shoreline.  The trees helped kill the wind.

No whales yet and I don't think wooden, stacked animals count as wildlife.

So we kept walking along the shore looking, longing for a whale.

But alas, no whales.  All we saw were birds, and this time I can't even tell you what kind of birds they were.  They were like a cross between a duck and a puffin.  So for all the wildlife no-shows Alaska is going to have to show us like a grizzly bear fighting a polar bear or something to make up for all of these stupid bird sightings.

Just walkin' around

                  

We decided on Sunday to go for a walk on some trails around the Mendenhall Glacier.  We wanted to see some bears but no such luck.  The only wildlife we saw were some robins, which we were glad of because they are so rare and only seen here in Alaska. 

 I thought it would be a good idea to bring the bi-oculars if we were going into nature.  Good thing too because those exotic robins stay quite aloof from man.  

Here the binoculars come in handy again to view the far away, equally elusive sea gull.

This is a picture one of the sea gulls took from their end.

Nice eh?

It was a good looking walk.

Welcome to Alaska

 So here is Katy standing in front of the dry harbor in Skagway, AK. This is a tiny town that is fed 100% by tourists that are brought in by the big cruise ships. So showing up before tourist season began meant we came to a dead city. The only place we could find to have dinner was a smoke filled bar where a large, not so great pizza was $25!  Breakfast was easier to find since there was a nice bakery in town but it closed at "4ish". 

From there we got on the ferry to get to Juneau.

Katy was cold and sad that her hair was blowing.

 

Once we got to Juneau Katy remembered going and seeing the Mendenhall glacier from when she visited here before, so we went and saw that.  She said is was this huge beautiful glacier. 

 

I do admit that is is very pretty, but big?  Look it's only about as wide as her arm span.  I've seen snowballs bigger than that.

A beggining and an end

Since we were going to be off again doing our own thing this summer I was threatened with much bodily harm from trollish siblings if I didn't start and meticulously maintain a blog for all to see what we were up to. We are actually in Alaska now but I thought it would be too much to just jump into that before we set the stage of our summer adventures. But then I had to decide where to start. I could have added my own views to the Chuck Norris/Easter event which contained much more cheating and black lung than Mysha really gave justice to but why tell the same story twice. Then I though it would be appropriate to have a blog entitled "Why Canada sucks" but thought that might be offensive to some and I really didn't have any pictures verifying my statement, so lets just start at Katy's graduation.



Katy's folks came into town to see Katy graduate
Their conclusion: Idaho is ugly, Wyoming is not


The Wyoming fam came too, well most of them

Their conclusion: At least our son's wife isn't a college dropout


Megan and Aaron came too which we were very glad of.

The following pictures went something like this:

"1..2..Katy's pregnant..3, snap".One Second later the mothers realize something was said, fathers still nothing

Two seconds later fathers realize what was said and mothers start dancing, and within that one second Shea dons a pair of sunglasses for some reason.