The Alaskan odyssey

I suppose I should blog at length about our recent trip to The Great Land, but eventually everyone reaches a point in their lives where it's hard to go on and on about stuff without sounding like an overstimulated child. So I'll just cover the high points:

• Glaciers, icebergs and snow-capped mountains are things that I will never get tired of seeing, especially since we were magically and mysteriously upgraded to a cabin with a private balcony (this was a cruise ship). Icebergs are bright blue, even up close, and it's fun to see harbor seals lying lazily upon them.

• By my count, we saw most of the animals we had hoped to see on this cruise: whales (humpbacks and orcas), harbor seals, sea lions, dungeoness crabs, jellyfish, sea cucumbers, dolphins, velociraptors, Canadians, a shiny Blastoise, and El Chupicabrae. Thundercat missed the dolphins, which makes a total of two cruises we've been on where I saw dolphins and she didn't. The crabs we saw included both those that were alive and those that were served with drawn butter. Whale-watching was the single greatest part of the entire trip, and I may blog about that someday. Two animals we did not see were black bears and whatever the plural form is of moose. The bears were a bit of a surprise, as hibernation had just ended and it seemed likely that they would be everywhere; we were a bit far south for moose.

• One animal I neglected to mention was the bald eagle, which appeared in absolute scads no matter where we went. The reason I didn't list it is because, where I grew up, the bald eagle is native, and not an unusual sight. Everyone else on the ship, however, would drop everything the instant one of the birds was sighted and start taking pictures en masse, completely neglecting photo ops such as a humpback whale bursting through the bay's surface, a rainbow so bright that you practically needed sunglasses to view it, and, of course, the total destruction of The Earth As We Know It. In Alaska, we learned, the bald eagle is as bothersome and damaging a pest as the common pigeon. It's also why no one up there keeps puppies or kittens in their backyards; they're bird chow.

• One of the most memorable excursions we took was to a dog sled camp, where we got to see all the dogs and actually ride in a sled. What happens is, you sit in a nine-seater sled that looks like a car with no top to it, harnessed to about eighteen dogs, whose moods switch from exhausted to wound up in the time it takes you to blink. As soon as we sat down, those dogs were ready to go, and when they got the word, we took off like a roller-coaster over some very hilly ground. For those of you who are wondering, the dogs are treated very humanely; this isn't Call of the Wild. They were extremely friendly and well taken care of, and we were even encouraged to pet them and to play with the puppies afterwards. Perhaps the most impressive part of the ride was the fact that one dog had so mastered the art of the race that he was able to run and poop at the same time.

• No one got seasick, through the ship threatened to throw us all about on our first day out to sea.

• Go on a strict diet in the two months leading up to your own cruise. You will eat so much rich, potentially lethal food on the cruise that you will be about two hundred pounds heavier when you disembark. They had to carry me off the ship with two forklifts. One for each cheek.

• A quick observation about disembarkation: there's no way you can cross that gangplank, getting on or getting off, without feeling like a refugee.

• This cruise was packed with senior citizens. We were probably one of the youngest couples on board, and there were very few children. To show you just how hilariously pitiful it was, all the gorgeous landscapes and adventurous excursions in the world couldn't hold a candle to what proved to be the single-most popular event, occurring daily on the ship: Bingo.

• I should've had a clue about the average age of our voyage's passengers on the flight to Seattle. I was sitting near the lavatory, and I never saw so many people get up to go pee in all my life. I thought we were traveling with the Society of the Clinically Incontinent. The flight back was better; I got a seat up front with lotsa leg room!

• Oh, and on our way in to Seattle, we flew over Mount St. Helens. That was pretty cool. We also flew over the tornadoes that decimated southern Kansas; it wasn't so bad for us, though the turbulence nearly sent Thundercat's ginger ale into the ionosphere.

I might post more later.