This was our second day at sea, and what a day at sea it was. We visited Glacier Bay and the scenery was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The mountains and the water and the clear blue sky were phenomenal, and then there were the glaciers. We stopped by three of them -- Reid, Margerie, and another one whose name I can't remember. Sheesh, not only am I bad with people's names, I'm also bad with glacier's names. The glaciers are miles-long, hundreds of feet thick tongues of blue ice that run from the end of narrow inlets up to the mountains. The ones we saw are called calving glaciers because chunks keep falling off of them into the sea, kinda like cows giving birth to calves.
Margerie was the best of the glaciers we saw. I saw a couple little landslide type calving incidents with it and then got to see one good-sized chunk splinter off and topple into the water with a boom. Glacier Bay is a U.S. National Park and we had a group of National Park Service rangers board our ship and narrate our tour of the park over the ship's public address system. It was like watching an Imax movie, but in person. The weather is still picture perfect. The ship's crew and everyone we talk to in the ports tells us that it normally isn't nearly this nice. Most of the time up here it's cloudy and cool and rainy, but it's been sunny and in the low 80s/high 70s for our whole cruise. And not only has it not rained, we haven't even seen hardly any clouds. So far we've hit the weather lottery. Here's hoping it holds for the rest of the cruise.
(Taken with my Nikon D90)
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