Alaska Trip

From June 6th to June 14th Jared and I went on an awesome cruise to Alaska. Here are some cool pictures from our trip:

This is our cruise ship- The Amsterdam. On the Holland America cruise line, all their ships end in the letters "dam" so they call them "dam ships". That joke is very appropriate for my family :)

Here I am "sunbathing" before they let us out into Juneau.


Here is a picture of Juneau from the ship. It's really not that big of a city and I can see why because the entire town is hugging the mountain. They have nowhere to expand.

In Juneau Jared and I went on a zipline (thanks Julie!). It was really fun although that first jump was so scary!

Jared on the zipline. He is so light that at one point he stopped on the line before reaching the platform and the guide had to hurry and throw him a rope and pull him in. It was pretty funny.

Here I am on the zipline. I kept turning in circles without meaning to.

This is the Tracy Arm Glacier we sailed by. It was so pretty and there were waterfalls everywhere along the way.

Our second stop was in Sitka. Here is Jared by a cool canoe.


There were tons of really old Totem Poles in Sitka.

This was my favorite thing in Sitka. It's this really cool Orthodox church from when Russians settled in this town and the missionaries tried to convert all the natives.

Jared and I were wandering around the town and we went on a walk through this cool forest. It was so green and beautiful there. And Jared kept gawking at these 6 inch nasty slugs.

Jared with his walking stick.

As much as I loved Alaska, my favorite stop was Victoria, Canada. It was so beautiful there! They really take pride in their landscaping and they have parks everywhere. It must not be that hard though- its so humid that plants just grow like crazy. Here is a picture of a famous hotel there called "The Empress".

The capital building in Victoria. It was really cute at night- there are over 3,000 Christmas lights all over it.

Of coarse we couldn't go to Victoria without going to Butchart Gardens. And they were amazing!! Its such a beautiful garden. This is a picture of us at my favorite part called the "Sunken Garden". The Butchart's got all their money from a concrete factory and they mined limestone in this area. Thus this gigantic pit was created and Mrs. Butchart was committed to not leaving the land depleted so they hauled in tons of topsoil and she built this unbelievable garden there.

Near the Sunken Garden was this huge fountain. It looks really small in the picture but the water shoots up to 40+ feet. It was so cool- like the Bellaggio fountain except instead of being in the middle of Vegas you are in this quite area with huge cliffs and waterfalls coming down near it.

This is in an area of the gardens that is made to look like Japanese gardens. That was one of the cool things about this place. Because Butchart Gardens is 100 years old, the plants are a lot more mature (which is necesary with Bonsai).


In the Japanese garden there were tons of cool little walkways that wound around streams and ponds like this.

This is the Italian garden area. In the middle there is a reflecting pool. There were also cool statues everywhere in this area.


This is my favorite picture I took at Butchart Gardens. I was upset that our ship docked at Victoria in the evening (we were at the gardens from 8 to 10 pm!) but at least that made for this pretty picture at sunset.

After our cruise docked, Jared and I spent a couple days in Seattle. It was really fun- we went to all sorts of museums. We really got to see a lot of fun stuff (even if I did waste Friday night obsessively reading Stephanie Meyers latest book). Here is a picture of the downtown area from the Space Needle.

Jared, Julie and me at the top of the Space Needle. It was so fun to be with Jared's parents the second day we were in Seattle.