After a quick breakfast in the Horizon Court, we got off the ship in Skagway and boarded a coach to the train station. The weather all day was great with temps in the upper 50s to mid 60s and intermittent sunshine.
Today we arrived early at Glacier Bay National Park and had park rangers with us for most of the day. They boarded from the vessel Seasac and the cruise ship barely even slowed down.
Today we had a leisurely morning at sea. After a lovely breakfast in the Bordeaux Dining Room, we had a nice worship service with Papa in our room, and then dropped the girls off at the kids club. We then headed to the indoor Lotus Pool for a couple of hours.
Before boarding the coach to Whittier, all of us walked down to the Snow City Cafe for a yummy breakfast. This place was like the Pancake Pantry of Anchorage with a fairly long wait. I ordered pancakes, fried eggs, and reindeer sausage. The eggs and sausage were served on top of the pancakes, which was a bit unusual but fantastic.
This morning we could see just a glimpse of the bottom of Mt. Denali from the deck of the lodge. I was way more excited than I should have been, but it is most often completely obscured by clouds.
The first half of today was free time while we waited for the coach to Mt. McKinley Princess Wilderness Lodge at 1:45pm. After eating breakfast at Sourdough Breakfast Buffet, we took the shuttle over to the Denali National Park Visitor Center. Our driver Bruce explained to us how to tell the difference between black and white spruce trees, which are prevalent in the park. The black have cones in the top and white have no cones. This stuck out to me, because Kate and Sara had been wondering how to tell the difference the day before.
After eating breakfast one last time at Edgewater, we boarded a coach at Fairbanks Princess Lodge and headed toward Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge just outside of Denali National Park.
This morning we had a nice breakfast in the Edgewater restaurant at the lodge before heading out on our tours. I had noticed on Monday night that there were these big chandeliers throughout the restaurant with bear heads on them.
Well, our two-week, land and sea vacation in Alaska is finally here. Today was a travel day with flights from Nashville to Seattle and Seattle to Fairbanks, Alaska. This took a bit over seven hours total and covered approximately 3,500 miles.
After a nice breakfast at the Hotel, we boarded a motor coach at 9am and headed into the city of Copenhagen. Our tour guide for the day was named Anna, and she was awesome. We learned that the population of Copenhagen is around 575,000 and that the overall population of Denmark is over 5 million. There is very little bandwidth for traffic in Copenhagen, so the primary method of transportation is bicycle. It was very difficult for our bus to navigate the 2-lane roads of the city with all of the congestion.
Our first stop was at Christensborg Castle. This castle has burned down twice and the current structure was built in the 17th century. We did not go inside the castle, but walked around the grounds and saw the entrance to the Denmark parliament, which is located within the castle. I found it interesting that they have no idea who the figures are who are carved above the entrance, so the people of Copenhagen call them headache, earache, toothache, etc. because of their poses and the position of their hands. In the back of the castle was a statue to Christian IX, who is known as the father-in-law of Europe because of how many children he had, and how many of his daughters ended up as royalty in other countries.
Not sure I’ll have enough Internet connectivity throughout this trip to blog every day, but gonna give it a shot:
Well, Saturday began a two-week trip with my Dad to Europe / Asia for an 11-day cruise of the Baltic Sea on the Regal Princess. The first two days have been all about travel. This included flights from Nashville to Atlanta, Atlanta to Amsterdam, and Amsterdam to Copenhagen. It was hard to leave my girls in Nashville, but I’m excited about my first trip to Europe and Asia, and especially excited about two weeks with my Dad. This group from Wilson Bank & Trust has 48 people and it is nice to have a tour director who is taking care of everything.
Apparently I’m in the minority, but I despise the @SouthwestAir boarding process. Today they decided to begin boarding 10 min early on a plane filled with kids. This meant that most of the families with kids boarded at the end, because they didn’t know Southwest was gonna jump the gun. Since no one has an assigned seat, It took an extra 20 minutes once everyone was on-board for them to rearrange everyone so that all the children would be able to sit with their parents.
Maddening!