Grandma's Visit, Part II

The second day in Seward we took one of those fjord cruises that takes you around the area and shows you interesting things-glaciers, whales, interesting sights, etc. We went with Renown Tours because it had the best times for our interest-12:00 to 3:00. It was an interesting tour-the boat was a little smaller than the Kenai Fjords Tours boats and the "lunch" they served was bagels and a cookie instead of all you can eat baked salmon, we still had a really great time and saw lots of cool stuff. I have lived in Alaska for almost 30 years and had never been out on one of these boats before. I would love to go again (on a tour whose idea of lunch is salmon, not bagel).


We actually saw a couple of real whales, but I did not get a good picture of them. The first whale was actually sleeping, and hardly came out of the water at all. THe second whale was CRAZY and jumped out of the water a bunch of times, but I was never able to get a good picture of it jumping. It was really cool, though...


We also saw some sea lions that were sunning themselves on some rocks. It was pretty neat how these huge fat guys could get out of the water and move about on land. They were really vocal and the bug guy coming out of the water in the picture here was yelling at the other sea lions to get out of his way. Oh-they were pretty darn stinky.


We saw a bald eagle also. They would come out every now and then to see what was going on on the boats-the tour captains used to be able to give them treats to entice them to show themselves to the tourists. The tour people can no longer do that, but the eagles seem to remember and expect treats.

Speaking of eagles, Jessica and I were driving home from church today and this huge eagle swooped down in front of our car on the highway and would've been smacked if I hadn't hit the brakes. It was cool to see one up close (it was so BIG!), but I wonder what it was doing. Was it sick or did it see something on the highway it wanted to eat? Maybe it was depressed!


This is Keyhole Rock. The water eroded it so that it looks like a keyhole. I thought this was a pretty cool picture-nature is amazing!