A Perfect Day at the Glacier

 Our original itinerary took us to Sitka on September 17. Well, that has been moved to September 22. We last saw the sun as we were entering the Queen Charlotte Strait, just north of Vancouver Island. Since then the skies have become grey and rain has intensified. Icy Strait Point is east of several islands whereas Sitka is exposed to the North Pacific. Hubbard Glacier is still on the itinerary even though it is accessed through a narrow channel. So, as of dinner time September 17 we are still at sea.

The seas have been moderate. Some passengers feel it more than others but I’m sure it is preferable to what we would have experienced had we attempted to reach Sitka. However, just at dinner time, 6 to 8 pm, we were exposed to the ocean as we came around one island and before we could be sheltered by another island. That was when we felt the 5 metre swells. It’s then you realize the ocean can toss our ship around like a toy.

This Monday morning, September 18, we find ourselves berthed at a place called Icy Strait Point. Our exact position is 58.135222 degrees north and 135.450714 degrees west. It is a Tlingit indigenous community noted historically for a fish cannery It is now the only private cruise ship port. Today’s temperature is listed as 10 degrees celsius (50 ° F) with overcast and occasional rain. Later in the afternoon the rain stopped and we took a very short walk ashore. Although we did not get to the village we did get to stretch our legs a bit.

The entertainment has been quite enjoyable. The production show “Encore” was extremely well done. Vocalists and dancers performed brilliantly with excellent orchestral support. We have found that there are four groups each of which has something to offer. A husband and wife duo, “Plus 2”, performs danceable material. Dave Barrett is a guitar and vocal entertainer who is very listenable and, occasionally, danceable. The party band is called “Ocean Club” and plays a lot of rock and latin tunes that are typically way too long for dancing beginning to end. We have met a couple from Vernon, BC who also enjoy dancing. Jillian and I have joined forces to dance things our significant others don’t like. We managed to get Ocean Club to play a salsa that didn’t last more than five minutes although it was close. There is also a string duo, “Mimosa Strings”, that play a lot of classical favourites and perhaps a tango or two.

The morning of Tuesday, September 19 was fantastic. Sun was brilliant and skies were clear. When we awoke at 06:30 we were just entering Yakutat Bay. Mount St Elias was poking up through the clouds. We progressed up the bay into Disenchantment Bay and the Hubbard Glacier came into view just as we were finishing breakfast. Once near the glacier the ship was rotated 360° such that everyone having an ocean view would be able to see the spectacle. So although it was not necessary we did go up to Skywalker’s Lounge on deck 18, almost the highest point in the ship. The ship made its way slowly back out to sea and toward our next port of call, Juneau.

The photo collection from Sept 16 to 19 should give you some idea of the change in weather. It would be nice if the weather remained as it was today particularly since the aurora may be visible through a clear sky.

Edith Wharton

One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are.

Carl Sagan

I don’t know where I am going, but I’m on my way.

A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen.

Mary Ritter Beard

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

Anthony Bourdain

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.

Shirley MacLaine

The more I traveled, the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

Samuel Johnson

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, see them as they are.

Rick Steves

Travel is rich with learning opportunities, and the ultimate souvenir is a broader perspective.

Paul Theroux

Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.

George Carlin

Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas and take your next trip in kilometers.

Mark Twain

Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.

Robert Louis Stevenson

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Susan Sontag

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

Aldous Huxle

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Michael Palin

Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.

Bill Bryson

I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.

Matthew Karsten

Investment in travel is an investment in yourself.

Ray Bradbury

See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream.

Mark Twain

One must travel to learn.

Emile Zola

Nothing develops intelligence like travel.

Augustine of Hippo

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving

Anita Desai

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow- mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Lao Tzu

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Marcel Proust

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi

Travel brings power and love back into your life.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

G.K. Chesterton

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essays

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Gustave Flaubert

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Mary Anne Radmacher

I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.

Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

Paul Theroux

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Lin Yutang

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

Horace, The Odes of Horace

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
(They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Every hundred feet the world changes.

Erma Bombeck

Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?

Roseanne Barr

Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.

J.A. Redmerski, The Edge of Never

I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.”

Winna Efendi, The Journeys

Most of the time, beauty lies in the simplest of things.

Paolo Coehlo

This wasn’t a strange place; it was a new one.

Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone’s home and backyard.

Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.

James Russell Lowell

A wise man travels to discover himself.

Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

There is more time than there is expanse of the world and so any voyage at last will end.

Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

Anthony T.Hincks

I’m here, and now, so are you.

Maarten Schafer, Around The World in 80 Brands

Quite some years ago, I started traveling the planet. I thought this would teach me something about the world we live in. I was wrong… It taught me something about myself. It changed me. And nothing will ever again be black-and-white again.

Jane Wilson- Howarth

A traveller with an open mind grows richer with each journey, with each encounter, with each conversation.

M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior

Travel can sometimes push us to lose ourselves and find ourselves at once. The shedding of old prejudices, dead skin, and the opening of one’s eyes is far better than what any mainstream news outlet could ever tell you.

Melody Lee, Moon Gypsy

I may be lost, but I’m traveling the right way.

Barnaby Allen, Pacific Viking

A port arrival makes you feel so free …To realize what it is to be a free man, with a world before him.

Rachel Wolchin

If we were meant to stay in one place, we would have roots instead of feet.

Anonymous

Travel with the wit of an adult, and the wonder of a child.

Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battutah

Traveling leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

Lailah Gifty Akita

It is never too late to take another voyage.

Marty Rubin

The secret to being a good traveler is liking a place before you get there.

Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.

Pat Conroy

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Pico Iyer

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry

There are several ways toreact to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina’s first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.

Jawaharlal Nehru

We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.

Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

Travel does not exist without home….If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.

Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.

Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.

Erol Ozan

You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system.

Clifton Fadiman

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Jennifer Lee

Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.

Hans Christian Andersen

To Travel is to Live.

Wallace Stevens

The most beautiful in the world is, of course, the world itself.

T.S. Eliot

The journey not the arrival matters.

Randy Komisar

And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want Lawrence Block on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

Henry Miller

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.

James Michener

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

Thomas Fuller

Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.

Martin Buber

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

Lawrence Block

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

Andre Gide

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Chief Seattle

Take only memories, leave only footprints.

Henry Rollins

A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.

Herman Melville

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Eugene Fodor

You don’t have to be rich to travel well.

Eric Weiner

Conventional wisdom tells us… we take our baggage with us. I’m not so sure. Travel, at its best, transforms us in ways that aren’t always apparent until we’re back home. Sometimes we do leave our baggage behind, or, even better, it’s misrouted to Cleveland and is never heard from again.

Mark Jenkins

Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self- determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. Theworld the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and- white.

Arthur Frommer

At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.

John A. Shedd

A ship in a harbor is safe, but it not what ships are build for.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Not all those who wander are lost.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.

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Robert Pesowsky
2 years ago

Impressive pictures, Ted…..thank you!