The In-Between

My Mom and Natalie had been recruited to pick us up at the cruise terminal, so we fought our way through the crowds and managed to find them-- it was a zoo!-- and my Mom even managed to spot all my in-laws and yell a Hello! out her window to Tom and Donna (she was worried Jason wouldn't remember her, so he was spared being hollered at! 😂).  We got one more day to hang out with my family!  Tracy was awesome and drove my Dad over to Natalie's, and Rachael and Ian were flying in to Seattle that day (but staying on Bainbridge), so my Mom and I drove to the airport to help them wrangle kids while they installed carseats in their rental car.  This meant that I got this slightly blurry fabulous picture of me holding a very sleepy and confused London.  

She was so out of it that when Rachael handed her off she just wrapped her arms around my neck and snuggled in while I murmured in her ear, I'm your favorite aunt!

My good friend (and former roommate/FLSR-ite!) Kathy also managed to come and visit, which is no small feat since she lives in Idaho now!  It turned out that she'd been planning on coming to Seattle the next day, so when I told her that was the only day I could see her, she bumped up her plans for me.  One of many reasons why she's a good friend!

We're still so cute!

We're training Camille and Hailey that they're also going to be roommates and best friends some day!

So between all that, plus my parents taking all the grown ups out for dinner (Thanks, Dad!), it was a very busy day, but super fun!  I went to bed way too late that night, stressing about things I might have accidentally left on the ship (they were just buried deep in my suitcase) and then we had to get up early and get at it to catch our flight.  Natalie and my Mom once again drove us-- it was so great of them to be willing to chauffeur us all over!-- and we got through security in plenty of time and everything went really smoothly.  

Flying is so stressful, so it was nice to have a direct flight and for nothing to happen.  We all just stared at our devices and the time passed fairly quickly.  It's so great having kids who are old enough to be easy on a plane!  I picked up the van from the economy lot while Craig and the kids collected all our luggage.  We stopped in Manassas for dinner at Cafe Rio and got me a milkshake at the Moo-Thru and rolled into our place at 10:30pm.  And then I went crazy trying to get as many loads of laundry done as I possibly could before we went to bed.

I think all told this was 8 loads of laundry.  Yowza.

Church was the next morning-- what a way to jumpstart us back on to east coast time-- and wow, I felt terrible.  AND I was teaching Young Womens for the first time since being called.  Perfect.  But even as exhausted as I was, I could appreciate how nice it was to be home again.  

We had a few days to try and get our feet under us.  Then Friday was my birthday:

Yay for 44.  Really, no one cares about that number.  But my red velvet s'more brownies were to die for!

Craig gave me a lovely pair of earrings that I'd picked out for myself in Alaska.

And I Q-ed FiA for my birthday, as is our tradition!  I did my favorite cardio-strength-yoga workout, and did not apologize for playing mostly Taylor Swift for it!  Ha!

And then the next Sunday Craig left church early to catch a train to Baltimore for a 4-day work conference and it was just me and the kids.  Which I hate.  Although, truthfully, I was too busy to be as sad as I usually am when Craig's gone. 

That's a lot of baseball games for Craig.  Orioles lost, but he got to see the Dodgers get a grand slam, so that was pretty cool (if you're not an Orioles fan)...

Once he was home we were racing to see Oppenheimer on Friday... 

Bentley dressed up for it, but then decided he really didn't want to sit through a 3-hour movie like that, and promptly put his comfy clothes back on.  But I love that he thought about it!  

and Barbie on Saturday!  (Those of us who had pink clothes wore them, but we forgot to take a picture!)  They were both really great in very different ways, and I was glad I saw them both!  It's so fun to actually be excited for a movie in the theater!  I did wish I'd thought to check the rating on Oppenheimer before taking my 16-year-old to see it, but too late now...  😬 And then Sunday was Craig's birthday!

42 isn't a whole lot more exciting than 44.  Craig decided on mint brownies, which were delicious.

So that was our two week whirlwind of fun and crazy before I left for...  Young Women's Camp!!!

ALASKA, Part III

After we left Juneau, we had two days at sea, which was pretty nice.  Not much of a schedule to stick to, and we could do the other stuff on the ship.  We began by doing their "mystery" game one morning, boys vs. girls.  Neither group quite finished, but the girls' team definitely had most of the clues figured out, whereas the boys had missed a major one, so I'm saying we won.  😁  And we had fun trying!

Could you have figured this out?

We went rock climbing again, where I remembered that I'm afraid of heights and the belaying systems sort of freaks me out.  I was going up, thinking to myself that the higher up I got the worse it was going to get, so I finally just let go before I even got very high.  I should have just practiced with the belay ropes for a bit, but then I was just rattled and wanted to leave.  Ah, well!  Everyone else was really good at it!

Bentley got all the way up, but this shot is cooler

Why did I think this would be a good idea...?  (Also, this picture kind of makes it look like I got higher than I did.  The ground is right out of frame here! 😂)

There goes Colton!

Then I headed to the solarium (the adult pools) at the front of the ship to read/nap/relax while everyone else went to try their hand at the flow-rider.  They had a GREAT time:

Ryder

I'm the worst mom ever, but this picture might have made me laugh...

But I love this picture so much.  Craig looks so happy here!

Here's a picture of Camille actually succeeding at the flow-rider!

Colton getting his hands up!

The instructors would show you what to do, and Craig said it was actually pretty helpful!

Love that smile!

Ryder liked this chandelier and had to take a selfie with it

Craig, Camille, and Ryder all did the indoor sky diving again.  Once again, Camille was super good at it!

Smiling as she floats!

Ryder might not have been a natural like Camille, but he was definitely having a great time!

Meanwhile, I was just getting comfy in the solarium when some guy came running up to the group next to me yelling, "Whales!"  The old lady sleeping next to me immediately woke up and everyone in the room hurried to the windows.  AND THERE WERE LOTS OF WHALES!  Humpback whales feeding in front of the ship, you could barely figure out that you were seeing mouths opening and there were so many birds flying all over the surface picking off the fish driven towards the surface.  I skittered back and forth across the front of the ship trying to see them all.  It was so cool.  I was so happy.  

Later in the day, we were all at the main pool when I saw that people were gathering at the windows and once again I ran back and saw two whales in the distance, and then two surfaced really close to the ship.  It was the best day ever.  I love humpback whales so much.

That evening, I persuaded Bentley and Kendra to try the lobster tail at dinner.  Why let my seafood aversion spoil everything for them, especially since it was already paid for?

Kendra was not a fan.  I'm not sure why Maya is hiding from the camera...?

This is Bentley's nervous face.  He didn't really like it, either.  But I was proud of them both for trying!

There are no whales in this picture, I just loved how the waves looked.  I could look at the ocean for forever.  Longer, if there are whales.

In the evening, after the shows and after the little kids had been tucked into bed, the older kids and the grown ups played card games out on the balcony.  It was so fun and lovely.

The next day for lunch, we got seated at the fancy chairs that look like they're for royalty!  They turned out to not be super comfortable, but they sure looked cool!!!!

We tried for a time to get a group picture all wearing our sweatshirts and finally managed to make it work!  Huzzah!!!

Party of 16!

And here's just our little family!

This is just adorable.  I have similar pictures of Kamryn giving Bentley and Lindsy giving Kendra piggyback rides here...

Then it was time to get off for one last shore excursion:

I can't even say "Canada" without wanting to sing it like the end of this Studio C...

We didn't have a lot of time and we didn't really want to pay to schlep 14 people all over Vancouver, so we just wandered around a bit.  We found this cool play sculpture:

Do you get it?  It's a straw being refracted by the water glass it's in!  Also, you can spin on it!

This park looked really pretty but our kids were not particularly interested in exploring it...

But at least they posed nicely for me!

Colton and Camille were tired of walking, so I stopped at a playground to let them play and the rest of the group went on to see if they could find some shopping.  I figured it couldn't be too hard to find the ship, but then as I was wandering around lost and my GPS told me to head to the Cruise Terminal in Seattle, I started to get kind of worried.  Fortunately Craig was able to send me a pin of where to head, and then I asked some woman who looked cruise-y which way to go and she assured me I was going the right direction.  So we got back to the ship just fine, and everything was fine.  

It wasn't until about an hour later that it hit me that I'd been wandering around with my two youngest children in a (technically) foreign country with absolutely no money, no ID, no credit cards and no real idea of where I was going.  And that was pretty stupid of me.  

All's well that ends well, as they like to say in Little House on the Prairie, but really, I need to be a little bit smarter than that going forward.

Sunset over Canada

That night the grown ups and teens played Chronology together and it was a blast!

We were back in Seattle when we woke up in the morning!  We enjoyed a very leisurely breakfast as we waited our turn to get off the ship.  And, of course, we all had to take pictures with the giant chair (which reminded me of Dr. Horrible, but bigger!).

This will be my album cover if I ever release a CD...

Our cruise was so wonderful.  I seriously loved every minute of it.  It was so awesome getting to see Alaska and all the whales.  All the whales!!!

Thank you, Tom and Donna, for an amazing vacation!!!  

ALASKA, Part II

The next morning we woke up to beautiful Skagway!  As we were leaving our rooms, our steward pointed out that we had notes on our door informing us that the whale watch we'd scheduled for the next day in Juneau had been canceled!  I was SO disappointed.  This was the thing I'd been looking forward to the most about this trip!!!  Jason and Craig were just plain furious.  We'd booked it a year ago, and now we would be stuck trying to reschedule 16 people???  That wouldn't even be possible!!!  The three of us marched down to guest services and Jason gave them a piece of his mind.  We also scheduled me for a different whale watch that still had one space available.  So I would be okay.  But it wasn't what I was hoping for, obviously.  I wanted to do the whale watch with everyone!  (And I kind of felt like a jerk taking the one space left, but Craig was pretty sure no one else could possibly care about seeing whales as much as I did...)

There wasn't anything else we could do until the Shore Excursion desk opened that evening, so we headed out for the day and tried not to worry about it too much.  (I'm very bad at not worrying about things until later.  But I tried.)  Once we were off the ship we did a little more shopping-- I let Colton and Camille buy stuffed animals for themselves.  And then we took a bus to a place where they train sled dogs for the Iditarod!  (And yes, I spelled that right on the first try!)

Snow!  You can see it!

Alaska is SO pretty!

It's always good to know that people consider your name to be a good dog name.  But my Dad is named Rex, so this is nothing new to our family...

That green vehicle was called a "mog" and we got to ride in it to where the dogs live.

This building was weird, but in an entertaining way!

Ryder and Camille were very excited to ride up front with the driver!

And the rest of us were all in the back!

This thing apparently had 8 gears for going forward and another 8 gears for going in reverse.  I can't for the life of me understand why that would be necessary...?  Also, it could haul quite a few people!

Who doesn't love adorable puppies???

Here are some of the dogs all ready to race!  It was fun to watch them, because they were SO EXCITED to get running!  As we all got seated in our "sleds" they started barking and jumping for joy!

These were basically like golf carts without the motor, but they held 6 people, plus the musher, who could brake and steer from the back

Happy doggies!

I think each cart had about 15 dogs pulling it.  And we went pretty fast, all things considered!

After a few laps, they let us pet all the doggies and tell them what a good job they'd done

We'd decided we should all wear our Cruisin' Together sweatshirts that Tom and Donna had bought for everyone, but then no one thought to tell Tom!

And, of course, everyone was very excited to get to hold the puppies at the end!

Especially Grandpa!

My sister Leah loves salmon, so I had to show these stuffed animal fish to her!

Alaska is so pretty!!!

We had enough time to get pizza and ice cream before our next excursion (the joke in this part of Alaska was that ice cream was MUCH CHEAPER than a gallon of milk, so they recommended just letting your ice cream melt and then pouring that on your cereal; yum!).  

And then we were boarding an old-fashioned train that took us through White Pass, where all the prospectors had to go for the gold rush!  The train ride was around three hours long, and I was a little worried as we began that we would get bored, but I ended up really enjoying it.  The history was fascinating (I grew up learning about the gold rush since Seattle was considered the gateway to the Yukon, and I love this kind of stuff).  The views were spectacular, and even thrilling at times!  And we got to see mountain goats, which I also love.  I definitely recommend this excursion!

Ruh roh. 
Seriously, though, we went on a trellis that was fully functional, but it was still terrifying!!!  What kind of chutzpah does it take to build something so rickety and then run a train across it???

Lots of snow at the top!

Going into a tunnel

Super cool.  But man, that gold rush was rough.  Good for Seattle, bad for all the people who tried to get rich quick!  Anyway, I learned a lot and the train ride was great!

By the time we got back to the ship, we'd missed dinner in the dining room, so we were about to head to the buffet, but I stopped by our rooms first to get cleaned up.  Our steward was there, again, but this time with happy news-- they'd reinstated our whale watch for the next day!  I have no idea why it got changed back (was it because of us yelling?  was it never actually canceled in the first place?  NO CLUE!), but I knew I needed to get this information to Jason--who had headed straight for the excursion desk-- before he could give someone else a piece of his mind!  So I raced downstairs and caught him just in time, and we got me put back in the whale watch with everyone else.  And then we got to join everyone else at dinner, much happier than we'd all been that morning!  I was so glad that I'd been too distracted by the cute puppies and amazing views to waste this awesome day worrying about tomorrow!

I was proud of this panorama shot I got that evening

The next morning we got up super early so we could see a glacier!  It was pretty startling to see chunks of ice floating by!  As we were staring at the glacier, we also saw a few seals swimming around, which was fun.  And the water the ship was in was all green and cool from the glaciers, so that was pretty awesome.  Definitely worth losing a few hours of sleep!

There's the glacier with all the in the water near it!

This was so crazy looking, where the glacier water meets the regular water!

I said, "Kids, let's get a family picture!" and Kendra stayed in bed!

Another shot of the two waters refusing to mix!

After that, the ship headed out of the fjord and chugged down to Juneau.  I used those couple hours of travel time to get a nap and then it was back off the ship!

Today we wore our new Bay Hay & Feed sweatshirts, except Kendra and I traded.  We agreed we would share our sweatshirts, since neither of us could decide which one we wanted more!

Like in Sitka, we took a bus to a different boat in a different harbor.  On the way, we saw a mama bear with two cubs, and a ton of bald eagles.  The boat headed out and the captain explained that we were going to head south because his whale senses were tingling.  As we approached a bunch of other boats sitting around not moving, he told us this was a great sign, and sure enough, within a few minutes of our arrival, we saw killer whales!!!  According to everyone, these are super rare to find (they said they hadn't seen any in two months), so everyone was pretty excited about this.  We also saw a sea lion and a humpback whale (briefly), but at this point, the stars of the show were those orcas.  They were transient orcas, which feed on large mammals (as opposed to resident orcas, which mostly eat salmon), so I was a little worried for the sea lion and humpback whale!  (But honestly, it would have been pretty awesome to watch them hunting!)  I didn't even try to get pictures, although I was nice and let the guy next to me with a crazy huge lens lean way out in front of me so he could get pictures.  Craig and Jason got these shots, though, which are pretty good for an iPhone!

After we'd had several good looks at the killer whales, the captain decided it was time to head north where he thought we'd see more humpback whales.  And we did!  There were at least two (plus a couple fins that I suspect were porpoises?) and a couple times we got to see their tail (flukes) after they'd come up for air, so that was awesome.

Keeping balanced as our boat went over a ferry's large wake

Thar she blows!

Be still my heart

So I was SO happy.  I've finally gotten to see humpback whales!  I just wished we could have stayed longer in case one of them decided to breach.  A dream for another time, I suppose.

We had one more stop, which was visiting Mendenhall Glacier.  This one was so blue and pretty!

Yeah, that's super cool

Things got messed up with the busses so we ran out of time-- it would have been cool to have hiked over to this waterfall!  But the glacier alone was still worth it!

It doesn't look all that impressive until you realize that all those specks along the bottom are people!

When we got back to our port, Craig wanted to explore Juneau a bit more, so he took Kendra and Colton with him, and I took Ryder and Camille back onto the ship.  (I wouldn't have minded seeing more of Juneau, too-- it looked like a cute town!  But I didn't want to just release Ryder and Camille without any adult supervision, and while we'd been trying to decide what to do, everyone else had already boarded the ship.)  I had a bit of trouble then because I hadn't bothered to bring my driver's license.  So I had to be escorted onto the ship by a 19-year-old TSA agent, while he explained to me that it was against the law for adults to not carry ID around and I technically could have been put in jail for up to 3 days.  Um, okay?  

Once aboard, we did the responsible thing and got ice cream before the soft serve place closed for the night!  

And while we sat on the 14th floor deck, I looked down and who should I see walking the streets of Juneau?  But Craig, Colton, and Kendra!  So that made me laugh.

We finished our ice cream and joined everyone else for dinner.  Cruising is so fun!  Next on the docket was roller skating.  I put on the roller skates and went about three feet towards where all the helmets and stuff were and decided that breaking my ankle would be a terrible way to finish up our vacation.  I took them right back off and just enjoyed watching everyone have a fun time!

I was sad to be leaving Juneau (and Alaska), but I got this lovely sunset as a parting gift!  

Meanwhile Craig and Camille played pingpong against Ryder

As it was the 4th of July, they had a "party" with a balloon drop at 11:30pm.  It was pretty lame, even by my standards.  I think they needed the lights to be lower and everyone to be a lot drunker for that to have been fun.  And fireworks.  They needed fireworks!

This was flag was covering the doorway to a pub, so people kept popping out from under it and then trying to squeeze past us.  Who puts a flag in front of a door???

But I was impressed with our cruise director singing The Star-Spangled Banner.  He didn't quite nail the hardest note, but he did pretty well, considering how difficult that song is!  And I'm a fan of any celebration of our great country, so at least they tried!

And once again, I think this post is long enough.  More soon!