Our Trip to Seward, AK (a Few Pictures), October 2023

 Yikes, was I late sharing these.  Life getting in the way and all.  But, enjoy, however late they may be :).  This was actually scheduled to go up last week, but I was down all weekend with my back flared up really bad and ended up getting a migraine from it, sooooo this ended up being later than I wanted it to be.  But, hey, now you get a few posts this week.  Bonus!!  *Laugh*.

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Our Trip to Seward, 2023

I know this is really late getting shared, but I thought I’d still post up a quick post with some of our pictures we got when we went to Seward last October.  Really, you guys are getting so see my pictures from the Sea Life Center, as that was the one indoor thing we did.  The rest of the trip it rained, a lot, so all of my outdoor pictures came out looking like rain and blurry stuff in the background.  So, enjoy the pictures of the fishies and other wildlife!

First, I’ll spam you with some pictures of the birds.  

My younger sister has always loved puffins, she even had a stuffed one as a child, so I took a bunch of pictures of them to send to her.  

The birds were surprisingly friendly, although I had to try and get pictures of them from a few small angles as those were the places in the exhibit that had roof overhead to shield my phone from the rain.

One thing I wish I could have gotten a shot of was the baby seals.  They fell in love with Alvah and followed him around the tank, constantly watching him and acting like they wanted him to play with them.  It was so stinking cute!  Unfortunately, those were some of the blurry photos that came out looking like I took them under water, so that was disappointing.

This pretty neat looking fish was hard to get a shot of as he was more interested checking out the daughter than looking at me, but I got a few shots in.  

This guy got jealous (it sure did seem that way) of the other fish getting its photo taken, so kept swimming right in front of my shot and staring at me.  I laughed and took its picture and then it seemed to happily swim away.

We drove down to a boat launch on the other side of Seward, which ended up being a lot of fun as it’s out on a spit that you have to drive to, which ended up being a neat drive to take.   This was a side trip I wanted to take as I wanted to go and actually see the beach.  My husband then ran into an older gentleman who lived on that side of Seward who remembered an old friend of my husband’s family. They had a blast talking to each other about people who used to live in Seward and how it used to be set up and things.  While he talked to the older gentleman, the kids and I sat and watched a really amusing squirrel that was running all over the place, but I could never get it to sit still long enough to take a picture of it.

Once we got to the boat launch area we went down and walked on the beach briefly.  It was cold and rainy that day, so I didn’t get much in the way of awesome photos, but I did find a really neat bone on the shore, left over from some sea critter’s dinner I’m sure.

 

On the road trip back, I did manage to shoot a few photos from the road and was impressed those came out well.

Overall, it was a short trip, but it was a lot of fun.  It was a shame that we managed to go about a week after the town had pretty much shut down for the winter, but we still got to see a decent amount of things and the kids had a lot of fun, especially Alvah.  He had a smile on his face the entire trip and pretty much laughed the entire drive down, which was wonderful :).

So, there you go folks.  My little photo tour of our trip to Seward.  It was a lot of fun and I hope that we can take some more road trips someday, hopefully soon as Alvah had SO much fun on that trip to Seward.

End of August Trip the Portage Wildlife Center (Plus, notes and updates)

Well, Happy September everyone!

I was going to just go ahead and post up a "Frugal Friday" recap post for the last...um...however long it has been, but instead of going through my crazy life at the moment, I thought I'd share something fun we were actually able to do last week.  Since the earthquake I've felt like I've been trying to play catch up on a global scale and at times failing miserably and the last bit more things have been breaking, things I'm going to have to go into debt to replace (yay more debt) and I have really found myself singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen.   This part really got caught in my head (with a slight lyric change by me)...

"Is this real life?  Is this just fantasy?
 Caught in a landslide (Note:  I replace "earthquake" for "landslide"), no escape from reality"

Anyway, warped humor aside, it's been crazy around here.  My husband really wanted to take a trip, but where do you go when 90% of the state is on fire (no, seriously, the majority of the state was on fire as of last week...it's been crazy and smokey and scary...we even had a fire down our road one day which made over an acre go up before the firefighters could contain it)?  Well, my daughter really wanted to go to the zoo, smoke or no smoke, but my husband really wanted to go to the Portage Wildlife Preserve.

The day we were going to go, I checked the weather/smoke reports and found that Portage, due to a change in wind direction was going to be relatively smoke free for that day while Anchorage was supposed to be REALLY smokey (which here are some pictures showing the smoke in the Anchorage area...they don't look too bad, but keep in mind these were the only pictures that showed up on my phone with any decent resolution to them).  So the husband and I convinced the daughter to go by saying we were going to the "big zoo" instead of the "small zoo"...it worked fabulously.  But, yeah, it was smokey on the drive until we got past Anchorage.

I even tried to take a snapshot of the inlet where the smoke was thick to make a "smoke on the water" type of joke, but the pictures didn't come out.

Anyway, after a well-enjoyed-by-the-son drive we arrived at the wildlife preserve, bought our passes  and somehow found a parking spot (which was a miracle with how crowded it was).  The son immediately went, found a shady spot at the food court, sat down and didn't want to move.  Not a great way to start a trip.  In his defense the eczema on the bottom of his foot has been awful of late and he was limping from it, so I imagine the idea of walking around all day was NOT what he wanted to do.  The husband took him for a walk to see some of the animals and I guess Alvah maxed out after a few of them and wanted to go and sit in the car and play on his I-pad for a good portion of the rest of the trip.

Meanwhile the daughter and I split up from the son and husband team and went looking at the animals...

We had obviously gotten there at feeding time because the porcupine kept trying to show everyone its empty food bowl.

It was really up close and personal and would give me great photogenic poses...until I would click the picture.  So, I did my best *laugh*.

The poor black bear was panting and just wanted some water.  It was very personable and really wanted someone to feed it or give it a drink.  They were coming up with the equipment to feed it as we were leaving, so I was happy to see it would get relief from its predicament.

I'm honestly amazed that so many of my photos came out.  I was using my phone and it was so bright that I couldn't see ANYTHING when trying to focus my camera when taking photos.  Sometimes it worked out well (like above) and other times I had mixed success...

If you look WAYYYY at the top of the photo you can make out part of two brown bears.  I got a great shot of a tree though *laugh*.

Some animals were nicer than others about getting their picture taken.  The moose refused to pop out of the barn and parked himself against the wall so you couldn't get a picture of him if you tried.  The reindeer stayed in their barn and weren't coming out in the sun and heat for anything.  The guys above were just kind of "meh" about life in general, but were at least out in the open.

The wolves tried their best to remain hidden in the weeds as they slept.  Not the best picture since I had to focus in so far to get them to pop out from the weeds, but hey, I found them!  It was like a grown up game of "Where's Waldo" with a lot of the animals.  The arctic fox alluded me completely even with a nice gentleman trying his best to point out its tail in the rocks to me.

We checked out a few more of the animals and then, finally not able to find the husband or the son anywhere, called to find out where we could meet up with them.

We found them over by a boardwalk that led to a nice walkway overlooking the inlet.  From the information boards I guess you can whale watch from the platform during high tide, but we were definitely there during low tide during a really dry year, so all we really got to see was a bit of water over lots of mud.

This was BY FAR the son's favorite part of the trip.  The wind had picked up a bit and started blowing wild growing grass around (which my son loves things like that) and he loved the play of the water over the mud.  I think we spent about an hour on that stretch of boardwalk with the son running back and forth laughing and having a great time while we chased him to make sure he stayed safe and didn't try to get down to the water or something.

I even got a good shot of the glacier from a different angle up the mountains.  I was totally mean and quizzed my daughter on glacial advancement and what the different parts of the glacier were called as we looked at it.  I was happy that I actually remembered so much of it...my daughter wasn't as thrilled with my memory *laugh*.

The husband the the daughter then took a side trip while I waited in the car with Alvah and warmed myself up (the wind was colder than I thought it would be and I hadn't brought my coat to walk around) to go and see the remains of Earthquake Park.  Earthquake Park is an area where during the 1964 quake an entire town had sank into the ground and had been abandoned.  The remnants of the town have been around ever since and they made "earthquake park" around it.  Unfortunately we checked for the remains of buildings that even I had seen when I first moved up here, but the buildings are pretty much gone, rotted, decayed and fallen in.  All that was left was pictures on the information board for the most part.  The husband was disappointed there wasn't more to see, but was able to explain to my daughter about the severity of the earthquake and things that had happened during it.  He even shared with her stories of his grandparents being in the J.C. Penney building in Anchorage during the 1964 quake (the building lost a side in the earthquake).  She was suitably impressed and we talked a bit about our own earthquake experiences on the way home, which was good for her to work through some of the trauma she's still dealing with on and off by talking through it.

Overall, I think the kids had fun on the trip, the husband probably didn't have as much fun as I would have liked (but did enjoy his buffalo bratwurst he got himself for the ride home) and I had a pretty good time.  I'd like to go back again and hopefully get some better pictures next time :).