Thursday
Well my brother Brandon got off of his mission in St. George
Utah on Wednesday August first and we all got to see and talk to him! Keaton and I couldn’t see him yet because we
were still in Utah. But on Thursday
Keaton finished his final early and we got to leave and go up to bountiful and
get chipotle burritos before going to our uncle Byde’s house! He drove us to the airport and there was like
no security, so we got like right through everything. We flew to Seattle and Keaton took a nap on the way but
I had a real nice lady next to me that really liked to talk. So I pretty much chatted with her the whole
flight! Crazy!
 |
| Plane we took across the bay to Vancouver |
Once we got into Seattle we had to get our boarding passes,
and then wait for like two hours before we got onto our next short flight to
Vancouver just across the bay. We ate
some snacks and watched airplanes come and go in rocking chairs in the huge
food court and atrium of the Seattle airport.
Then finally boarded our small double prop plane that only held like
sixty people! I think it was a Q400
model. The flight was only thirty-eight
minutes long, and when we got into the Vancouver airport the border control
lady was not happy at all! She spoke to
me in French then English and I thought I responded politely that I only spoke
English and she was just having a fit the whole time she was asking me
questions and stamped my passport and I got away as fast as I could! Weird!
We waited in the lounge for the rest of the family to come in, and saw
some strange people in there waiting as well.
The worst of which was a middle aged woman nursing her baby girl and
wasn’t covering herself up! Just out in
the open, not caring about privacy or modesty!
 |
| Seattle airport, waiting for our tiny plane to Vancouver |
Finally the family came in and we all regrouped and said our
first hellos to Brandon then got our stuff and went out to catch our shuttle to
the hotel. We crammed all of our luggage
into a twelve passenger van with the back bench taken out and then all nine of
us plus the driver when there were only seven seat belts! A little crazy! That night I was the only one that got into
the hot tub. Everyone else was tired and
I guess didn’t want to move anywhere but to bed.
Friday
Friday morning is when the real fun began. Brandon talked me into lifting weights with
him at seven in the morning. After that
we went to the continental breakfast which was actually pretty decent. Then we all got Sunday clothes on and helped
ordain Keaton to the office of elder with a stake representative that came to
the hotel. Kind of a cool experience
because all of the older brothers got to participate because President Peterson
from our home ward planned it all out for us.
Very cool experience.
Then all the boys minus Justin went down to the pool and hot
tub for about an hour. We went back and
watched some of the Olympics; I think it was women’s one hundred meter dash
qualifications. Then two van taxis came
to take us to our boat. My driver was
from the Philippines and had studied to become a priest! That was kind of interesting. Then we got there and saw our boat! It is huge!
We waited in security lines and got weird looks from so many people
because we were such a large group. When
we got onto the boat we walked around outside on the decks to explore a little
and then started watching little bush planes take off and land on the
water. Brandon really enjoyed that.
 |
| Unloading at the cruise ship |
 |
| Moving luggage to the ship |
The boat really is huge!
Thirteen decks, several restaurants, a nice gym/workout area, indoor and
outdoor pools, two outdoor Jacuzzis, and one indoor. A movie theater and a performance theater
mini golf, rock climbing wall, two self-leveling billiards tables supposedly
worth eighty thousand dollars each, an incredible atrium with balconies from
deck two to deck thirteen, and our rooms were cool! A full bathroom, with a couch, TV, two twin
beds plus a drop down bunk from the ceiling.
We were pretty happy with our stay on board. One of the best things for me was that our
room was on the inside of the boat so when you turn the lights out it really is
dark! It made it easy to sleep.
 |
| The Atrium |
 |
| Outdoor pool deck |
The first day they delivered our luggage to us and what a
blessing that was because it would have been a night mare to try to find our
rooms the first day while dragging around all of our luggage! Especially with two thousand other people
trying to do the same thing! When we
finally departed we went under a bridge that crossed the bay, and we were
literally like two foot away from hitting the bridge! Kinda crazy because the bridge has to be well
over one hundred feet above the water, probably even two hundred feet!
We ate lunch at the Wind Jammer Café which is like all you
can eat buffet. All the boys went and
played mini golf. Then we swam and got in the amazing Jacuzzis! And let me tell you they really were
amazing! The best that I have ever been
in! Perfect amount of bubbles and a
fantastic temperature!
 |
| The Wind Jammer |
 |
| Under the bridge |
We traveled up what is called the inside passage. It is a passage between the mountains and
islands that border Canada and Alaska that are very near the shore. So we basically cruise in an ocean filled
valley off of the coast of Canada and Alaska!
For the majority of our trip we could see beautiful lush mountains on
either side of us. It was very impressive.
And the water was so calm and beautiful!
It was like glass!
 |
| The inside passage |
 |
| Me, Brandon |
That late afternoon we performed a safety drill, just to go
over what to do if we had to evacuate to the safety rafts. That
night we had a formal dinner, and I had a Black Angus steak! It was very delicious! After dinner there was an opening show with
singing and dancing and a standup comedian that was pretty funny. And afterwards the brothers and I went
swimming again! Talked to a guy that
worked on Ohio class submarines which was pretty cool. Then we got some pizza at the snack bar while
Nathan went to a teen thing. It was a
pretty fun first day!
 |
| Our room server Norm, was very creative! |
Saturday
I woke up at like 7:30 to work out with Brandon only to find
that he had already gone up without me! So
I go up there and meet him and we work out for a bit, change cloths and then go
down to the formal dining hall to try out breakfast. Surprisingly we didn’t get very good service
and had a forgetful waiter and the food took forever to come out. It was really frustrating especially for my
mom. But I did end up eating herring and
an omelet for breakfast. Got to try new
things you know and I continued to do so throughout the trip! After breakfast we all went outside to the
rock climbing wall and mom, dad, Keaton and I all tried the wall out. Brandon did
the best, which surprised me actually.
Brandon and I kept talking while Keaton and Dallin played basketball
with other kids from the boat. Then
Brandon and I played shuffle board then knockout (with basketballs). Just good relaxing times on the boat!
 |
| About to Rock Climb |
We ate lunch and played mini golf for a bit. Then in the late afternoon we had dad’s
fiftieth state presentation. It was
pretty cool, because he reviewed basically all of the family vacations we have
had and talked about what states we visited each trip and how we finally got to
Alaska our fiftieth state! i missed like four or five while i was on my mission, but close enough! That evening we got in the
Jacuzzis again and watched Grease Lightning on the outdoor big screen. At the
formal dinner that night I had duck scallops with berry mousse and pineapple
papaya soup! It was fantastic.
That night we went to see the show called The Piano Man,
where the onboard singers and dancers sang and danced to classic piano artists
compositions. Composers like Elton John,
Billy Joel, and Styx for example. They
did a pretty good job. I was glad that I
knew all of the songs that they performed.
After that, Keaton, Brandon and I all went up to the café and got pizza
and tried to spy on Nathan at one of his teen dances. But we were tired and went to bed shortly
after.
Sunday
We got to Ketchikan during the night and when we got up we
could see the port. Initially Justin and
Melissa went off on shore to call the babies (my twin nephews Andrew and Isaac
staying with her parents). We went
through shops in Ketchikan just to look around.
Ketchikan is a city that can only be accessed by boat or plane. There are no roads that lead there, which
also means that all of the cars have to be imported.
After shopping we hiked up above the city and went on a
trail in the Alaskan rainforest!
Typically when I say rainforest one would think of like the jungle in
South America, but I am not kidding when I say that this was a rainforest
too! Huge green trees, tons of moss,
water running everywhere, and huge trees!
It was wonderful!
 |
| Hiking up the road |
 |
| Hiking up the trail |
 |
| Gorgeous forest |
 |
| Crazy branches in the trees! |
We eventually got back to the boat for lunch, and then went
back on shore for another nature hike at the other end of town. We saw many very big red salmon and many
different totem poles too. We through
some small shops in town and had a lot of fun with some walkie talkie
games. You see, each boy in the family
has a nickname for something stupid or memorable they have done in their
childhood. Mine, for example, is “cactus
butt” because when I was three or four years old I accidently sat down on a
small cactus when playing in the mountains on a camping trip. So on the walkie talkies we would only refer
to each other by our “nicknames” and it was really fun.
 |
| Brandon, Melissa, Justin |
Once back on the boat we all took a good nap before
dinner. That night was business casual,
and we all looked really good. I ate a
ton of food that night, the highlights being Cranberry Mango Soup, Jalapeno
Potato Soup, and Banana Bread. That
night we had a short little Family Home Evening or Fireside about Brandon’s
mission. It was good for him to talk to us
all about it. The whole time we could
see the gorgeous country of the inside strait outside mom and dad’s balcony
door.
 |
| Dallin was exhausted |
 |
| Dallin, Keaton, Nathan on the board walks |
 |
| At dinner, mom ordered "nothing" for dessert and this is what they brought her! |
Near dusk the boat moved into a wall of fog. The moon started to come out on the water’s edge
and it looked a lot like the light of Captain Nemo’s ship the Nautilus
preparing to charge us! Kind of creepy
to think about.
Monday
By morning we had arrived at the tiny town of Hoonah, often
called the Icy Point Strait. There was
not anything nearly as our boat in the entire little town. The dock didn’t even reach out to our
boat. We took little rescue boats called
tenders to the shore. Tenders are small
round submarine looking boats that can hold up to one hundred and twenty
people. They are stored on deck five and
have little crane devices to lift them up and into the boat or set them down
into the water. That was cool to see for
me.
 |
| Tenders |
 |
| Little water falls everywhere! |
 |
| Our Dad! |
 |
| Another awesome towel creation from our room service man! |
Anyway, the main tourist attraction there was this really
long zip line. They created a store out
of an old salmon packing house that still had the packing machinery and
such. We signed our waivers and got on
our bus that took us up the mountain to ride our zip line! We drove into the
clouds and were above them for several hundred feet. Just as in Ketchikan the rainforest was so
dense and beautiful! We watched ten or
so people go before us, so we had mentally prepared sufficiently before taking
off! The zip line is five thousand three
hundred thirty feet long, and has an elevation drop of over thirteen hundred
feet with a maximum speed of sixty miles per hour! Don’t worry!
I videotaped the whole thing so that you could experience it too!
It was an awesome view on the way down! When we start they ordered us from lightest
to heaviest for some reason. And once
our harnesses came back up the lines we went and got strapped in. We had to put our feet on our gate door. And
then they said one, two, three and the gates opened and we were falling! We didn’t get out of the clouds for several
seconds before we could start seeing the country. And we got going fast! The wind was blasting us and twisting us in
our harnesses! Finally at the end there
are like twenty feet of springs at the end of your line that slow you down and
catch you in a pretty abrupt stop! It is
really fun!
 |
| Bus up to the top of the mountain for the zip line! |
 |
| We are in the clouds! |
 |
| Dallin, Justin, and I |
 |
| The Clouds |
After the next group came down, (only six at a time go), we
walked around the bay and to the town.
On the way we saw gray whales, eagles and jelly fish! We followed the whales for a while because
they were going up and down, back and forth along the shore! Once to the town, it was a little… small, to
say the least. We ended up coming
straight back and got back on the boat, and took a nap before dinner. At dinner, I ended up getting the Rigatoni
dish and Strawberry Bisque. All the boys
played basketball, then some mini golf, watched a bit of T.V. and went to bed.
 |
| Humpback hales! |
 |
| Warm Chocolate cake with chocolate sauce on the inside, and Strawberry Bisque! |
 |
| Rigatoni! |
 |
| Brandon's steak |
 |
| Keaton ballin'! |
 |
| Brandon |
 |
| Justin |
Tuesday
We arrived at Juneau
during the night and were excited to see another new place! We got some bus tickets and went up to see
the Mendenhall Glacier. It is a huge
wall of blue ice that appears to be falling out of the valley into a melted
lake. It is accompanied by a rather
large water fall created by natural springs and snow melt. There is a beautiful
nature trail that we walked that takes you much closer to the water fall and
glacier and though it was raining a little, it really was just
magnificent. Also there at the p[ark
was some raised board walks where you
could walk through more nature stuff and look for animals. Recently, they said, many different bears had
been spotted. Well we got really lucky and
saw a small black bear! He got close to
the board walk and the ranger told him to go another way and the bear listened! He ended up eating one of the super abundant
red salmon’s that were everywhere in the river and on the banks. We also saw an eagle perched and then take
flight too!
 |
| Touching a piece of the glacier |
When we had had our fill, we went back to the boat and ate
lunch, then went back into the city to look through stores. This city had one major strip of stores that
you could walk up and down basically. I found
a great coupon with which I bought myself and ULU knife with cutting board and
bear claw salad scoops! And I only paid
ten bucks! I will attach a picture so
you can visualize what they are. But the
cutting board is cool too because it has a bowl like indentation in the center
so you can chop and dice with the ULU and it will fit the blade better and keep
whatever you chopping from getting pushed away! So an ULU is a native knife to Alaska,
picture an axe head and take the blade off of that axe head and put a handle across
the back of it. That is an ULU, using a rotational
cutting action it is razor sharp and easy to chop and dice like I said! So far I have used it many times and I love
it!
 |
| Similar to My ULU, I use it for everything! |
 |
| My claws are cooler than these but you get the basic idea. |
That night the whole family got into the Jacuzzi. At dinner I ate Indian food. Afterwards we all got together to play Wits
and Wages. It is a game where there is a
question with a fact answer, and we all make a guess and put the guesses on the
table. Then put some of our chips on the
guess that we think is right and if ours is, then we get a certain amount of
chips back on top of the ones we bet. It
was sort of fun, but got really frustrating after a bit, because we thought the
answers were off and others thing like that.
So to blow some steam, the boys all got hot chocolate and went and
played mini golf while drinking it.
Wednesday
Today was Skagway, our last port before the end of the trip! Brandon, Keaton, and I ordered room service
for breakfast and it was good, but not as good as the options upstairs at the
buffet. Skagway is a tiny town,
basically run off of tourism. We walked
into town and rented two Buicks and then proceeded to drive them into the
valley. We took Highway 2 from Alaska to
British Columbia and the Yukon Territory and it was an absolutely gorgeous
drive! The mountains are so immense and
beautiful, with crystal lakes at their bases.
It was so clear you could see reflection of the mountains above them in
the water! We saw places where
avalanches had occurred and also a place where tourists had built their own
little rock towers with loose rocks by the road that had been left by glaciers.
So we of course had to do the same.
 |
| Rock Towers |
 |
| Keaton is a dog |
 |
| I love this picture so much and it only capture a fraction of what it truly looks like! |
 |
| Tired and weird brothers |
The wild flowers were very pretty, and we got to see a moose
also! At one point we tried to move this
huge rock into the lake, but it was just too heavy and big, plus we had to go
on. Perhaps if we had had more time we
would have gotten it into the lake! That
night when we got back it was formal dinner time again. All dressed up we ate in the dining hall and I
got some Thai chicken. We looked so good
that mom wanted to take some fun pictures of us riding in the glass elevators.
 |
| Avalanche detectors |
 |
| A towel bat! |
 |
| Self leveling pool table |
Thursday
Bright an early in the morning we were supposed to arrive at
the Hubbard glacier. Brandon and I got
up at 6:30 to be some of the first to see it.
That should be easy for us, but after six days on a cruise be treated
like royalty, it was immensely difficult!
But the worst was that we hadn’t gotten to the glacier yet! We were a
little late I guess. But after a half
hour we saw ice chunks in the water. Then
in another twenty minutes or so we arrived at the glacier. It was ginormous! At least four times as big as the Mendenhall
glacier! They said that three hundred
feet of it was above the water and over eleven hundred feet underwater! And that is was like three miles wide! The whole thing is estimated to have a
surface area of one thousand acres! That
is a huge piece of ice!
 |
| Early, icy cold morning |
When ice chunks fall off of the glacier they call it calving. Basically, it is silent everywhere because we
are in between two mountains, floating in the water with all the engines and
stuff turned off. Then you hear these
crystal clear and loud cracks in the ice and a few seconds after that these
huge sheets of ice fall into the water! It is really cool to experience! One piece that fell off was large enough that
it went under the water and bobbed back up out of the water several feet like a
miniature iceberg! We were able to catch
one of these calving’s on video too! We were
so interested in the glacier that every single one of us had been up in the buffet
for breakfast but had brought many things back to mom and dad’s room because
they had a balcony.
The boat had a glacier expert on board and he kept getting
on the intercom and explaining he glacier and why it formed and stuff. At one point he got the entire boat to yell
at the glacier while the boat blasted the fog horn to see if we could get any
bigger pieces to fall. I thought that
that was interesting that they would encourage that. After that we were back on the ocean and it
was cold, we were a lot further north now.
So we played phase ten, and mini golf with hot chocolate. That night the finale show had a really good
juggling act that we all enjoyed a ton! He
could get six pins going too! While he
was eating and apple! That night we got
packed up for the morning departure.
 |
| Mom and Dad like theatrics! |
Friday
We had an early breakfast and then de-boarded the ship. We were in Seward which is about two hours
outside Anchorage. We rented one car,
and our good friend Claudia Ashton drove down from anchorage to get us as
well. We shopped a little and threw the Frisbee. Then went and saw the Exit Glacier. It is receding a foot a day. They had signs along the road, measuring
where the glacier had been in years past and it used to be enormous! It was a nice hike up there.
Just outside anchorage we got to a wildlife
conservation zoo. It was actually really
cool. Big grizzly bears that were semi
trained! They sat up and clapped hands,
and laid on their back in the water just like Baloo in the Jungle Book! There were also caribou and elk and bison and
moose! It was very cool! Most we saw had full racks and everything!
On the way back mom bought us some bakery goods that were
each huge and rather expensive in my opinion.
We ate dinner at a delicious burger place by the river in anchorage. Then mom dad and Brandon and I went to the
anchorage temple for a session. Claudia was
so great to us! She really is
wonderful! I ended up flying out that
night to get back to salt lake the next day.
I was really tired, but The Avengers was on the screen so I stayed up
and watched that and then still got a few hours of sleep. All in all a fantastic vacation! Thanks mom and dad!
