Alaska, day 5

Day 5 of our vacation brought us to Skagway. Skagway is an old gold rush town, where men would come for a while to look for gold, and then leave again when the rush was over.

Skagway is like walking back into history. It's really quite fun. All the streets are still made of cobblestones, and the sidewalks are all planks.

While in Skagway, we took some time to play around with cheesey pictures (surprise surprise)

While in town, we took the opportunity to stop at the Red Onion Saloon and have a few Alaska Beers. The fun thing about the Red Onion Saloon is that it was a brothel at one time. The downstairs was a bar, and the upstairs was 10 brothel rooms that the men would frequent quite often.

Mady, being the big girl that she is now, felt the need to walk around town by herself. This only lasted a little while though...not because she got tired or anything, but because it took forever for her little legs to carry her any distance, and we were getting nowhere fast.

We also took the time to stop in at a replica bar. It was set up just like it was in the past during the gold rush, with old time bottle of alcohol and manequins and all.

Did you happen to notice the matching sweaters Mady and I had on today? I totally planned it that way..cheesey, i know, but i loved it :)

At dinner, our waiter made Mady her own little menu to order from...it was so cute!

She also enjoyed a special dessert of chocolate chocolate chip cookies, brought to her specially by our waiter. She really liked him, and he liked her too :)

By the end of the night, Mady was totally worn out

All in all, Skagway was a good day.

Stay tuned for more Stiffie adventures in Alaska tomorrow :)

Alaska, day 4

Day 4 of our Alaskan cruise took us to Juneau, the states capitol. Juneau is a beautiful city, but the only way in or out of it is via boat/train/birth canal. All the roads in Juneau come to dead ends, they go nowhere. It's pretty neat, but scary at the same time.

We began the day by exploring downtown Juneau, and all its wonderful shops and attractions.

Mady, of course, was attracted to the stuffed life sized animals...

We made our way to the Governors mansion. We were hoping to see Sarah Palin, but then we remembered that she quit and it was some new guy living there. He didn't seem as interesting...

We did our shopping on the way back to the ship, so we wouldn't have to carry all the bags. Mady got tired, so we had to carry her too.

We dropped our bags off on the ship and then it was time for our whale watching tour. I was so excited to see whales!! That was one of the main things i came to Alaska for. We set out on a chartered boat that had a heated indoor area and a top deck you could stand on and look off of.

Of course i picked the top deck!

The scenery from the ship was breath taking!

We saw a beach full of sea lions in the middle of nowhere...

This was only a small sampling of them. They were so loud, and they were splashing around in the water like it was summer time! (well, technically it was summer for them, lol)

And then came the whales...

They were both far away and close to the boats. They even swam underneath the boat! But they were very difficult to capture on film.

Mady loved the whales...

She gave them an "a-ok" in her book...

It was so beautiful!

We then made our way via bus to the Mendenhall Glacier. It was ginormous and breath taking.

Do you see the size of those floating ice chunks?!

Check out that waterfall!

Just plain gorgeous...and i mean both Mady AND the glacier :)

We also saw Bald Eagles circling...

By the time the tour was over, we were all pretty worn out from our amazing day. It was one of the most wonderful days on our entire cruise!

Stay tuned for more cruising with the Stiffies, tomorrow :)

@ss-hole!!

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blogging to bring you some not-so breaking news....Michael Jordan is the biggest @sshole on the planet! Not only is he a pompous jerk, but he is ungrateful and down right rude and ignorant. I always knew this, that's why i dont like him...but for those of you who, for some stupid reason, liked him, check this out...

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slug=aw-jordanhall091209&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

Seriously dude, get over youself. No matter how good you were, and yes, i said WERE...you are a total loser now, and that totally overshadows anything great you ever did. Grow up, ass hat!

Alaska, day 3

Day 3 of our Alaskan cruise took us to Ketchikan. We docked around 6am, but that didn't matter to Madylinn. She decided to sleep in. When her majesty finally arose, we set off for breakfast and

then made our way out to explore Ketchikan.

Once off the boat, we were greeted with a cute little statue at one of the restaurants...

Please don't feed the bears, lol

We proceeded to Creek Street, which is a famous row of stores that were, at one time, all brothels (whore houses). Their saying there is "Both the salmon and the men come upstream to spawn".

As you would assume, there is a creek that runs below all of the stores there, and in that stream are about a zillion and a half salmon. I've never seen that many fish in one place in my entire life! The stream where the salmon would jump up

Mady thoroughly loved the salmon and Creek Street, even though she slept through about half of it.

After leaving Creek Street, we made our way to an area of town where they had lots of vendors and an animal rescue. At the animal rescue place, they had a screach owl that was full grown and only about 6 inches tall, they had a horned owl with a broken wing, and they had a female bald eagle that was recovering from surgery. They were very tame, and we could get very close to them. It was amazing.

After that, we went shopping in the many stores that are by the docks. Then, before we left Ketchikan, we stopped for lunch and Frank and I had a few beers.

Alaskan brewed beer

We, of course, stopped on the pier for some cheesey pictures...

Mady loved the bear

The boat left Ketchikan at around 2pm, so we spent the rest of the evening enjoying the beautiful scenery

The mountains over Ketchikan

(there are 2 whales there...do you see the whale tail and the whale spray next to it?)

Stay tuned for more of our Alaskan cruise tomorrow :)

Alaska, day 2

Day 2 of our cruise was a cruising day. This gave us lots of time for exploring the ship and doing activities onboard...even though most of those activities were geared more toward the older crowd. Our day started remarkably late, as Mady decided she wanted to sleep for 14 hours straight. Lucky for us, 4 of those hours were spent in our bed, lol.

But once she was awake, she was all over the place. She loved walking around the room and on and off the balcony.

We had a fun day walking around, staring off the rails of the ship, and taking lots of cheesey pictures of ourselves.

(do you see the whale spouting?)

And even after a long, 14 hour sleep...Mady still found time for a nap during the day...

We ended the night with a gorgeous sunset. It was a nice, relaxing day spent on board...which we all needed after a hectic day of flying the previous day.

Stay tuned for day 3 tomorrow :)