Wednesday: Stu Visser Trail

I went on a walk with Cheryl this morning.  I finally made it to the end of the Stu Visser trail!  It seems like this shouldn't be a big deal as the trail is about .7 miles, but it's been flooded most of the times I've gone.  The last time we went it wasn't flooded, but we meandered for a while before then and so we turned back before reaching the end of the trail.  Afterwards Ben joined us for lunch.

Since the car is parked outside it gets all dewy and the boys really liked the patterns that were made once I started driving this morning.

vacation Friday: Happy Birthday!

We actually slept to an almost normal time this morning: 7am. I was a bit worried about this; I expect

that we’ll start getting used to the time change just as it is time to go home. We went to one of the

downstairs restaurants today for breakfast because they had a chocolate croissant and as always it was

delicious. They also had a pretty good almond croissant, but there wasn’t quite enough marzipan in it.

The weather in the morning was foggy. There isn’t really anything for us to see besides the waters of

the Pacific ocean today though, so I guess it isn’t a big deal. We do have some blue glass as our balcony

walls, and it always makes the water look bluer than it actually is. It’s a good trick.

Do you see my birthday cake?

We did a scavenger hunt this morning. We were paired with two other people which actually worked

out really well; they knew were a lot of things were. It was also a race, which was unexpected. We tied

for the win! It ended up being a lot of fun…we all got into it, even though at the beginning we all said

that we didn’t really care about winning much.

The winners!  Our medals even say 'winner' on them.

In front of the Discovery sign

Pretending to get out of the water

A wedding proposal by the chaple

By my fish that I never saw on the monitors

We rested for a while in the room and watched a movie. We did take another walk about the boat,

stopping for some pictures and to play some mini-golf. I won! They also were missing holes 5 and 6,

which seemed rather strange.

Dinner was in a special dining room. It was a five course meal and absolutely delicious. It started out

with bread and bruschetta, followed by fried calamari, linguini carbanara, veal, and an assortment of

desserts. I also got a birthday cake and off-key song, which we elected to bring back to the room for

later. (The cake that is, not the song.) If I did it again, I’d probably ask for half portions of everything. I

still only ate about half of everything and was still completely stuffed at the end. Speaking of birthday cake, it was my 40 th birthday today! There are digital signs all over the boat keyed to the medallion thing you need to wear, so they were often saying “Happy Birthday Amanda H!” But…they were rather tricky. They only did it sometimes when I was nearby. Or they’d do it after I was waiting there for a minute due to the elevators. It was so much fun trying to find them.

Although we had plans to find a hot tub at night, we ended up reading. We were both in the middle of

good books and sometimes that’s a hard thing to put down.

Tuesday: work

It was a pretty normal day today.  I felt like both classes had a good rhythm to them, which was nice.  Several students also realized they didn't have a good grasp of references ($) in excel, but now is a good time to figure that out.

We ordered a new garage door from a different company.  It will be installed on Friday and was significantly cheaper.

I went to karate.  We were working on our forms, which is always my favorite part.  He ended up splitting the class into groups and both adults knew our form well so we got to work on some of the more technical parts: how to stomp your foot, holding your arm at a 60deg angle instead of a 45deg, etc.  I really like it when we get this nitty-gritty because ...I'm not sure why.  I just do.  It doesn't happen very often though because I don't always learn the form until right before testing.

Monday: star student

Joshua is star student in his class this week!  (It's a bit weird because last year he was almost last and this year he's first.)  He worked hard on his poster this past week but I forgot to grab a picture of it before it went to school.  He's also been planning for his show and tell with great consideration!

Otherwise, not much to report today.  Joshua and I had great dental check-ups.  As part of O:CtH I worked on the purple bathroom, but since we had people over yesterday Isaac had actually cleaned/picked up a lot of it.

 

Sunday: play date

Isaac was supposed to have a playdate after church, but it was raining.  (It was very rainy which was lovely.)  So the family came over here instead and it was a lot of fun.  The adults played several games and the kids played well together.

vacation Thursday (Aug 18): Skagway

I woke up too early, but around my normal time of a bit before 5am. Today we were in Skagway. Today

the weather was beautiful! It had originally called for a light rain, but there was no rain, no clouds, and

even a bit of sun.

Due to a recent mountain slide, we had to go ashore via tender. We’re one of the lucky Princess cruises

that still gets to stop in Skagway; most of them for the month have been rerouted to Sika. (I’m sure

there’s nice things there too though.) We were going on a train ride up a mountain where the gold rush

path was. The train was right by the pier, so it was a quick hop-on. It was beautiful...so here's a picture overload.

Back of the train

Saw-tooth mountains

Into a tunnel!

At the turn-around in British Columbia

Another glacier

So while the port side of the train was definitely more beautiful with wide landscapes and soaring mountains, the port side on the way back was still very interesting.  All the rain caused lots of little waterfalls, and it turns out that I love waterfalls.  We probably saw one at least every minute or two.

We took a brief stop in town for more shirts, picked up some rocks from a creek for our rock -loving son, and walked back to the boat. After lunch we rested, but there were several helicopters making the

rounds to deliver cargo. One looked like two bombs. One looked like a giant roll of toilet paper. One

was a shopping bag with a box in it. Needless to say, we couldn’t come up with any reason that

helicopters should be used instead of trucks, but I’m sure there was one.

Rock slide area that caused us to use the tenders:

We had dinner at a different table that was right next to a window as we were leaving Skagway. Our

table is usually quite good, but it isn’t right next to a window. It was weird though because Ben and I

couldn’t see the same things at the same time due to the thickness of the window, the curtains, and the

table location. I’d say, “look at this cool waterfall!” and by the time he could see it it was out of my

view. It made for some difficult conversations, to say the least. Anyway, we wanted a table by the

window because we were in a fjord. (A fjord has steeper sides than a valley and has seawater and glacial water.)  The sides were pretty steep at the beginning but became normal mountains after an hour or so. After dinner we sat on our balcony to continue watching the scenery and reading. We saw one glacier, and even saw one of the officers taking pictures of it. It made us wonder if we had really good weather and that the mountain peaks were normally covered in fog.

We didn't get many (any?) room pictures, so this might be the best.

After dinner we sat on our balcony for a bit with blankets until it got too cold.

Both of us took some pictures through binoculars, but it's rather tricky.

The bridge took a small portion of our view away.  We were a bit annoyed, but nothing we can do about it.

We did try to see the northern lights again, but it was cloudy. 

In other news, today was the day the quilt show started!  I got a few pictures of my quilt.

Friday: upkeep

I brought Ben's car in for an oil change.

We found out we need to buy a new garage door.  (If we want windows, it will take 9 weeks.  Probably worth the wait, but oof.  Also, insulated or not?  While it would be better energy wise, it's also significantly more expensive and we've been pretty happy with our current non-insulated one.  It would especially be expensive because we'd have to get two new doors.)

Isaac and Ben went to Magic tonight.  Joshua and I pulled out a brick box.  Here he's making a ring while blind folded.  Er, while Grey Beared.