Juneau is called (by the Lonely Planet) 'Alaska's little San Francisco'. It certainly lived up to its name today, when, while walking to a Rainbow Grocery, we spotted a trolley car on wheels, identical to the party trolleys in San Francisco. This is the nice view from our campground, only a mile from town. Cruise ships line downtown, blocking views of the water and nearby mountains. We quickly headed for the hills and visited Mendenhall Glacier. Here are some pictures from the hike. Tomorrow we are hopefully catching an early boat up to Haines. Tomorrow happens to be the last day of the Alaska State Fair. From Haines, ferry space allowed, we are headed all the way down Petersburg, at our friend Alex's recommendation. From there , we chug our way back up to Sitka where we will hopefully be so lucky as to meet up with our Salty Dog Robin, who is working offshore catching the King (Salmon, that is). Then we return to Juneau only to catch another sea vessel, the Kennicot, across to Whittier.

Greetings.

Thanks for visiting the blog. The intent of this blog is to have a place where pictures and brief updates of our adventures are available for you to see. This first post will inevitably be boring and off-point because we have neither pictures of us-in-alaska, nor stories to be told.

Here is Alaska. I did not realize how ignorant I was to the geography of this state until I made plans to visit. So, I have provided this scant map for reference.

Many of you have requested our itinerary. This is what we know for sure:

We fly out tonight, and arrive in Juneau tomorrow morning (after an 8hr layover in seattle). We will be in the southeast portion of Alaska for 12 days, taking ferries and possibly a plane or helicopter at some point. On August 10th, we take a long ferry ride from Juneau accross the Gulf of Alaska to the Kenai Peninsula, which on the map above the peninsula housing Homer. We have a 5 day canoe trip planned covering 40 lakes joined by streames, and sometimes by foot. After a bit more traveling on the Peninsula, we will be headed up to Anchorage, Denali nat'l park (see Mt. McKinley on the map), and onward and upward to Fairbanks, where we will be flying out of on the 31st.

There are many holes to be filled.

Thank you for visiting the site. Please come again, and feel free to comment. As long as technology allows, we will be sharing many photos along the way!

Here is a photo from last weekend. We went north of SF on the coast, near Balinas. It was beautiful, with lakes to swim in and beautiful ocean beaches.