June 9 June 10 June 11 June 12 June 13 June 14 June 15 June 16 June 17 June 18	Friday June 15, 2007 We arrived in Juneau about 6:30 this morning, or so the Princess Patter says... I got up about that time, but didn't look out right away. After breakfast, I went off the ship to join my tour for the day - a Photo Safari by Land and Sea. Our tour guide was named Liz and she was very nice. There were nine of us on this trip. A Japanese couple from Toronto, a family of three from San Francisco (eight year old girl in this group), a mother and her two daughters (12 and 14) from Atlanta, and me. All three girls were very well behaved and interested in what was going on. I only saw i-pods come out once and that was on the way back to the dock at the end of the water portion of the trip. Our small bus took us to a small boat marina where we boarded a boat that had been specially designed for photography - a fairly stable platform. It was a nice sized boat (we were told it was 30 feet long) with rubber pontoons down each side for added stability. That's it pictured to the left. It was a gorgeous day - very few clouds and those were the good kind. I wound up not wearing my jacket at all today. The sea portion took about 2.5 hours and we wandered around a few places in the sound. Along the way, we spotted over 40 bald eagles, some close enough for pictures (the one on the left above was posing in the small boat marina before taking off - center photo), a pair of humpback whales - mother and offspring. They cavorted for us for quite a while. No tail shots, but the mother did lunge feed once for us. That involves the whale coming up from below a school of fish and scooping up as many as possible as about 1/3 of the body rises above the water level. Fantastic to watch. Only one of us caught it with the cameras and he's promised to email us all copies of it. The photo on the right above is the best one of the humpback whales I got that day. The two puffs of white are the whales exhaling (or blowing). After playing with the whales for a while, we went over to a channel marker that the stellar sea lions really like. They were piled on it as thickly as they could. Several others swam over to see what we were doing. We circled the marker a couple of times, then headed back to the dock. The photos above show the sea lions and the channel marker. Fantastic morning. Then the bus took us to the observation center for the Mendenhall Glacier. There, we hiked one of the trails down to the river level for some unique views of the glacier. We also spotted two brown bears - one near the water (just barely visible in left photo above) and one scooting down the trail away from us. The left center photo above is of Mendenhall Glacier. The right center photo above is the Mendenhall Glacier with Mendenhall Lake and floating ice. And the rightmost photo is of glacial ice. Lots of lupin in bloom, too (left photo above). All in all, very worthwhile. I could have spent more time there, too. Back at the visitor's center, one of the rangers had a display of brown bear skins with a skull (right photo above). The center photo above is a close-up of the bear's claws. Back to the ship (this is a photo of the line waiting to get back aboard) to download photos and relax a while before dinner. Absolutely beautiful afternoon. Mom went up to get a piece of pizza, so I went up a little later and got some ice cream. She saw that and wanted one, also. So I did it up well... She wound up skipping dinner, as she was too full... We watched the ship pull out of port. Very interesting. Our side was dockside for this port, so we watched the side thrusters take us straight out away from the dock about 100 feet, then the forward thrusters pushed us backwards for a ways before we pivoted and took off down the channel. So Mom missed the king crab legs... Dinner was very quiet - just M, K, and me. I think C and J have skipped out on us... I'd rather not sit directly across from K ever again. Her face and eating habits remind me of a pig... After dinner, I tried again to do email. The Internet connection is down again. That's twice I've carried my notebook forward only to find that the internet connection was not operational. So I just enjoyed a glass of wine and read my book and enjoyed the music in the atrium area for a while before turning in. I worked on this journal for a while before going to bed and noticed this view out of our balcony door. Next...