I don't know...Alaska!

Soooo much has happened in the last few months.  Chris & I spent the better part of July traveling from coast to coast.  Literally.  We went to Alaska, Seattle, and South Carolina.  See, I'm not exaggerating!

So Alaska.  Chris' sister Karen, her husband Mark, and our nephew Hayes all moved up to Anchorage in January.  So we knew that one of our summertime destinations would have to be Alaska.  Within minutes of arriving, we immediately spotted this guy in their backyard.

That's a moose.  And it's big.  And it's just grazing in their yard.  Nuts.

The next morning we woke up early and got loaded up in this RV.

Once in the RV, we headed down to Homer, AK.  The picture above was actually taken at an RV park in Homer.  This was a first for all of us-- but being in the RV (parked) was kind of fun.  Not so much fun when the thing was driving and I was sitting in the back.  Felt like a bad boat ride.  Also, there were bad boat rides, but we'll get into that later :)

Life in the RV was fun.  We did crazy things like cook our food over a fire...

And checked out awesome scenery like this:

The next day, we drove down to the Homer Spit, which is a narrow piece of land that juts out into the Kachemak Bay.  So there was water on both sides-- a great place to spend a night!  We woke up the next morning and caught a water taxi to an island (can't remember the name) for a brisk morning hike.

Water taxi = cold ride.

The hike led us to this glacier.

Yeah, that was just an excuse to post a super cute picture of Hayes.  Can you believe how big he has gotten?????  I want to kiss that little face!

Chris was able to catch a piece of the floating glacier ice.  He was quite proud to be holding ice that was likely 2000 years old.

Also on the hike: lots and lots of bear poop.  Huge fresh piles.  I was not so much bothered by it because it was gross, but more because it indicated that actual, big bears were nearby.  Fortunately the poop is as close as we got to an actual bear.  I was scared.

We ended the hike with a beautiful view of the bay (?).  I pretty much didn't know where we were the whole time :) But it was nice to just not worry about that stuff for a while.

The end of our hike led us to this beautiful view of the bay, which we enjoyed while waiting for our water taxi to pick us up.

Our next stop was Seward, Alaska, another coastal town.  We stayed right on the water once again.

One day while in Seward, we took this awesome Kenai Fiords National Park boat tour.  It was great-- while we were in the fiords.  In the open water of the Gulf of Alaska, however, sea sickness sunk in.  This is an ongoing problem of mine, and let me just summarize this story by saying that this was by far my worst experience!  I think I'm done with large boats (though I think I'd be ok on a very large cruise ship).

Despite the ill feelings, I saw a lot of awesome wild life and it was definitely worth it.  This is another glacier that we saw...

Yes, these are my terrible pictures.  I blame the camera-- my stupid point and shoot has crapped out, I think.  This is Mark, taking pictures with his fancy camera:

My pictures look terrible.  Meanwhile, he was getting shots like this:

That's from the boat tour!  We really saw that.  Amazing.

I think I covered most of the high points.  So now I'll just leave you with a few shots of Hayes in his favorite spot on the RV--- on the dashboard!

It was a great trip.  And it was especially great getting to spend time with this guy & his parents :):)