ALASKA!!

We went to Alaska in August and loved it. Granted, the kids probably would have been just as happy at a place with a swimming pool and a pet store, but I'm glad we did it. We went on a cruise ship from Vancouver Canada to Whittier Alaska and then spent a couple of days in Anchorage. Brace yourself for a lot of pictures. It was really hard to narrow down to these from around 700 or more pictures!

Sail away from Vancouver
Allison caught red handed pulling the knobs off of our light in our cabin. I told the steward the first night not to bother putting them back on until after we were off of the ship. Notice the chocolate ring around her mouth. Yummy, yummy ice cream on the ship.
Our days at sea were spent mostly swimming, relaxing, and of course... eating. :) The kids had a lot of fun in the water. Matthew is luckily getting more comfortable in the water and loves to be in it as long as he's near the edge. Allison has no fear and didn't want us to help her swim.
Our first stop was in Ketchikan. Dave's parents were with us and were kind enough to watch the kids for us. We had scheduled a bear watching tour, but they made a mistake and had us booked for a tour of Misty Fjords. They tried to make our schedules match up, but it didn't work, so they offered to take us on both tours. The Misty Fjords were beautiful, but I was worried most of the time that Dave was going to get motion sick like he did on a helicopter flight we went on in Maui. He luckily survived, but I think he'd be fine if he never goes on a sea plane again.
The bear watching tour was my favorite part of our whole trip. We took a short sea plane ride to Traitors Cove to see bears in the wild. Our bear guide gave us an odd sense of security. We saw several different bears near the rivers and one bear was just slightly below us and probably within 20 feet of where we were standing. I surprisingly wasn't freaked out ...completely weird to think about now.

Next day we stopped in Juneau. We went to Mendenhall glacier and basically just hung out around there. They also had a creek with some salmon and we were able to see a couple of bears and the kids saw them with us. Dave stayed with the kids and I walked down to the waterfall by the glacier.Skagway was our next stop. We just walked around the shops, looked at the trains, and played at the playground.Matthew's Birthday! He turned 5 while we were gone. That day was spent at Glacier Bay. We went swimming and watched glaciers all day and the weather was perfect. It was fun.
More glaciers the next day. We went to college fjord. This time we saw lots of black specks on the floating ice and they were sea lions.The cruise was over, but we spent the day we got off of the ship and the following day in Anchorage. The Alaska Conservation Center was cool. We saw moose, baby moose, buffalo, bears, eagles, etc. The trainer was there when we saw the grizzly bear and he did a few tricks for her.Matthew got to feed a reindeer at the Wild Berry Products store. He thought that was pretty cool. We went and saw an Iditarod show and got to hold the little puppies. They were so stinkin' cute.
OK, just a couple more pictures. There were a ton of really pretty flowers there. Could have spent a lot of time just taking pictures of them and driven the family crazy, but I settled for just a couple. :)
We watched the sunset before we went to the airport and it was a great way to end our trip.