Tuesday, July 14: Day 32

So many pictures today! I only put up about 30-40% of them, too! We slept in today and I took Matthias in to work by myself while mom got ready. On the radio coming home, a commercial came on for a day cruise. I almost changed the station because I figured it was one of many that come on. But I started to hear things that I had never heard before. First of all, they said you get so close to the glacier that you can hear the ice groan. I was picturing a boat so close you could touch the ice, so I kept listening. It said it was a 1 hour cruise. I thought, "How do you get to a glacier and back in 1 hour?" Then they said it was $24 and gave the website. I got home, mentioned nonchalantly that I heard about this cruise we might want to look into and snuck over to the computer. Sure enough, everything advertised seemed to be true (although there was no way to tell about first fact yet). It's usually $29 but there was a $5 off coupon. It took off at Portage, which is about 45 minutes south of Anchorage and they had 5 or so different take-off times. So we got our gear together and hit the road!

At the main office, we saw this display that showed how much of an iceberg is visible above water. It's amazing to me how deep they go when you only see just a little bit of it.
This was the view from the window of the building. The cruise ship took us around the corner of the mountain on the far right. Portage glacier is right behind that point.

It wasn't long before they called for boarding. Off we go...
I can't emphasize enough how many pictures I did NOT put on here. It was very difficult to narrow things down.I have a really cute mom:

We saw some calving and I somewhat managed to get a picture of it. You can see the spray of water from the splashing if you look closely.

Just like flowers, I just have to get a picture of a waterfall whenever I see one. This is where I had to do a lot of cutting out (I could have posted a couple of dozen).

I love how you can see the little trickley waterfalls coming off of the glacier.I included this one because it's a cool shot of the ede of the ice field that this glacier comes from.

And some final shots I liked:

On the way home, we stopped off at Bird Point and took a few pictures of the view. Seward Highway is on of the top 10 scenic byways in the country, and for a good reason. The road goes along the bottom of the mountain on the left in this picture:

Along the mountain side, you can often find patches of purple. There's a wildflower called Fireweed that grows everywhere up here and is just gorgeous.

A funny thing about my mom is that she likes to take pictures of people taking pictures of other things. So I finally decided to take a picture of her taking a picture of something else to document this quorky thing about her. During the course of the week with my mom she took about 3 pictures of me taking pictures of something else.

After that, we started back on the highway only to see the cars in front of us start to stop. We noticed a few cop cars and then came a fire truck and ambulance. We looked above us and saw a helicopter circling a spot on the water. It was all very curious. All we could see from the road was this:

We pulled over to see if the helicopter was going to pull it out of the water but it never did. One of the cops had a motorized raft and they looked as if they might go out on it, as well, but they didn't either. So after about 15 minutes, we decided to head home. We never figured out what it was...just a bobbing black thing that looked very suspicious. Any ideas?