Monday, July 20: Day 38-Tuesday, July 21: Day 39

We left for Girl's Camp today! Matthias pulled an all-nighter at work. I dropped him off at about 12:30 a.m. this morning and picked him up at about 1:30 p.m. Poor guy. But it helped him feel a lot less stressed, ironically. He was coming as one of the two priesthood leaders, and I'm so glad he did!

Our destination was Seldovia, AK. And for those of you who aren't familiar with where this is on a map, please refer to the one I've provided for you below. It's a 5 hour drive from Anchorage to Homer and from there, you take a 2 hour ferry/charter boat to Seldovia. The only way to get to Seldovia is by boat or plane, which is the case with a lot of Alaskan towns. It has a population of about 300, 1 dentist, and when women have babies, they travel to Homer to do it. So imagine, won't you, the size of this place.

After meeting up at the church, we carpooled down to Homer, a coastal town that is famous for it's deep-sea halibut fishing charters. tt's a 5 hour drive and we planned to stay the night in an LDS church gym so we wouldn't have to make the drive so early the next morning. At the Homer "spit" (I'll talk more about that when we go to Homer another time), there was a ramp that we had to lug our gear down to pack onto the charter boat.

Since it was high tide, it was super steep. And since it was raining, it was super slick. But we perservered and after many, many trips back and forth carrying sleeping mats, 5 days worth of food, fishing poles, waders, bikes, and anything else you could possibly bring for a group of 17, we loaded onto the boat. We were all pretty wet, but in good spirits because we were ready for adventure. Here are the girls from my Sunday School class getting ready to sail away (from left to right, Haleigh, Cara, and Brooke):On the way to Seldovia, we stopped to see a couple of landmarks. One of them was this huge rock with all kinds of birds on it. And I saw my first puffin! For many fascinating facts on puffins, follow this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffins#In_culture. Because of how cold and wet it was, there weren't many around at the time of our arrival, so I didn't get any fantastic close-ups. This will have to do for now:

Here are some other shots I took from the charter boat:

This is called Elephant rock:

Once in Seldovia, it was still raining. We fortunately had some carts to push our gear up onto firm, Seldovia, ground. We had a 15 passenger cab waiting for us and we stuffed it to the brim with all our stuff and sent it on to our campsite. We walked ourselves through town and then to the outskirts where our campsite was. The challenge was keeping things dry while we set up camp. We covered all our stuff with tarps while we got the tents up. Then we put our gear in the tents we'd be sleeping in and tied the tarps to trees to create a ceiling for the eating/fire area and also for another small area where we kept all of the food. You can imagine how wet we were at this point, so we immediately got a fire going and thankfully the area under the tarp was large enough for us to comfortably sit by the fire and get dinner ready. This is what the main area looked like: During our orientation that night, we heard bird noises and I looked up at a tree not too far from our site and saw a bald eagle! There must have been a nest nearby because we saw a couple of them all throughout the week.

So even though it was technically two days, I included it in one post because it felt like one big long day with a small nap in the middle.

Sunday, July 19: Day 37

Today was awesome. I invited a guest speaker into our Sunday School class to share stories about priesthood power. This particular person used to (or maybe still does?) work as a sealer in the Anchorage, AK temple. He shared a few really phenomenal experiences he had had with the priesthood. I could never retell them the way he did, but I was so grateful he came because his stories brought the concepts of the lesson across better than anything else I could have done. Incidentally (and this has nothing to do with anything, it's just interesting), his daughter is Hillary Weeks. I didn't know that her roots were in Alaska.

Saturday, July 18th: Day 36

Today the Young Women and leaders got together to practice kayaking at Jewel Lake to get ready for girls camp next week. We were taught the basics of getting in and out of the kayak as well as general safety tips while you're out on the water. I'm excited to go next week!

I was in charge of making the menu for Girl's Camp and therefore put together the shopping list for the food. We were supposed to include the girls in the shopping, so I divided the list into groups and assigned 2-3 girls for each group/list of items. It worked out pretty well, if I do say so myself. I figured I should document it in case I ever have to do this again. The extra planning really helped out. Everyone was super productive and we got out of the stores in record time. We should have some tasty meals, I hope.

Friday, July 17: Day 35

One of my favorite things is taking a picture of Matthias for no good reason just to see what face he'll make...And just so he doesn't feel like I'm picking on him, I'll put a picture of me up that was also a random shot for no good reason. It was one night while my mom was here and we were just goofing off. In late high school/early college, I would make goofy faces a lot of the time when getting my picture taken so I'd have an excuse when the picture didn't turn out cute. I don't know why or what started that, but it is what it is. Just recenly, it came back to bite me when my sister put one of those pictures up on my Facebook wall. Thanks, Beek!
Embarrassing? Yes. But now maybe Matthias won't be too upset when he browses my blog and finds the above pictures of him. I love you, hon. I especially love the funny faces you make at the camera.

Thursday, July 16: Day 34

90% or more of what I Tivo is from the Food Network. In fact, my newly-found hobby of cake decorating was inspired one day as I was watching Ace of Cakes. I was enjoying what they were doing so much, it just occurred to me, "Why don't I learn how? What's stopping me?" I started googling "cake decorating", went to the library and got a couple dozen books on it, and a couple of weeks later, found a series of classes at Michaels that teaches it. It made me realize how many resources there are out there for anyone trying to learn something new. I love it.

In general, I just love watching people cook and getting new ideas for meals that are healthy and easy. When I was young, I would sit and stare at what my mom would be doing to fix our dinner. It was pure entertainment and not much has changed when it comes to this fascination. Sometimes I'll just go browse books at Borders and read on their comfy chairs and my favorite section is the nutrition/cooking section. One of my projects of late is to make a recipe book that is basically a collection of my favorite tried and true recipes from the various books and online searches I have done. It's so nice to not have to work so I can get stuff like that done!

Here's a few shots of Iron Chef. I rarely end up liking what they fix because they always add these odd ingredients that only a small part of the population knows about and appreciates. Still, I love watching how they incorporate the "secret ingredient" into each course of the meal.

Wednesday, July 15: Day 33

Today we took it easy and got a few things done, like copied my pictures onto a CD for my mom, cleaned up the house just a bit, and then my mom bought me a camera case for my birthday. (Thanks, Mom!)

We stopped by the Alaska Wildberry Products store, one of my favorites up here. They have a ton of different souveneirs, but more importantly, they have the largest chocolate fountain in the world with the signatures of all the characters from the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. They specialize in all sorts of chocolates. My favorites are their chocolate covered: berries, licorice, chow mein noodles, oreos, and penuche cream. Yum.

If that wasn't enough deliciousness for one day, my mom made us her famous tacos with homemade hard shells. This was one of my favorite meals growing up. For dessert, I made a cake for my mom. It was a teeny, tiny one that we all shared so we wouldn't get too sick. It's my favorite flavor: white chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream.

It was extremely hard to say goodbye to my mom tonight. I'll miss her very, very much. I'm just so glad she could come and stay for as long as she did. I love you, Mom!

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?