Alaska

For someone who hates the cold, I sure had a great 10 days in Alaska! Nick and I flew to Anchorage to visit his mom, Liz, and had a wonderful time with her. The first thing we did? After sleeping and getting up the energy, we walked just across the street to Baxter Bog. We were very eager to see some Alaskan wildlife, even though that didn't happen the first day, we got some great views of the mountains and nature.

After some more relaxation, and a few episodes of Dexter, we took our first day trip to Talkeetna.

 Talkeetna is a small town with great views of Mt. Mckinley, and happens to be Nick's favorite place to visit while he's in Alaska. We walked around the town and popped into some of the open gift shops. We also walked by the airport...

We then enjoyed some beers from Denali Brewing Company, where we were able to sit outside and enjoy the nice weather before driving back to Anchorage.

Our next day trip was to Seward, which turned out to be my favorite. It was a beautiful, but long, drive with fantastic scenery - though where in Alaska is there not fantastic scenery? Seward won my heart with it's SeaLife Center. It was great to see the seals and sea lions swimming around, but anybody who knows me knows how much I love ducks and other diving birds. The bird room was by far the coolest thing ever. The area was open so the birds, and puffins!, were able to fly around you. Also, when you went downstairs you could see the bottom of the tank where the puffins would often dive for food and you could see them swimming under water.

We enjoyed views of downtown Anchorage from Earthquake park..

...then drove up to Flattop mountain. There was too much snow to actually hike to the top, but we got even more great views of the city.

Our luckiest day for seeing wildlife was when we went to Whittier to take a 26 Glacier Cruise. On this 4-hour cruise we got a hot lunch and saw 2 porpoises, hundreds of sea otters, a few seals, a bear, and an eagle. The best glacier was Surprise glacier. They took the boat right up next to the glacier so everybody was able to get amazing pictures. The crew also took some of the ice out of the water and made glacier margaritas.

We had some amazing day trips, enjoyed great scenery, looked through Nick and Maggie's baby pics,  and watched 3 seasons of Dexter. It was a great vacation, though one last thing is worth mentioning. Liz's cat "Kitty" hated us! She was so mad that we invaded her home for 10 days. She constantly watched us, hissed and tried to attack us, but she was adorable.