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The 5th Annual ACFA Cruise |
Last Updated 10/22/2010
There's a land where the mountains are
nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There's a land - oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back - and I will.
The Spell of the Yukon by Robert Service
For the last five years, the American Cat Fanciers Association (ACFA),
with the help of St. Armands Travel,
has sponsored a week long cruise. A percentage of the profits from this cruise
are donated by St. Armands Travel to the fund-raising efforts of the
organization. Until this year, the cruises were all in the Caribbean, but this
time out ninety-nine intrepid travelers headed to the far North and Alaska!
Words really can’t express how wonderful this trip was for Leah and I, although
the quote from Robert Service’s classic poem above comes close. We hope you
enjoy seeing some of our photos. If you were there, perhaps they will bring
back happy memories and a smile to your face. If you weren’t there, perhaps you
will now long to see the country for yourself (contact St. Armand’s at the link
provided above and I’m sure they’ll be happy to help you out).
Seattle – Early Arrivals!
Most of the small pictures can be
clicked on in order to bring up a larger version of the photo. Please
take a look at the larger versions in order to fully appreciate the details!
I’ve also provided links to various areas of interest. The links will be
underlined. Just click on them to visit those sites!
Leah and
I decided early on that if we were going to travel clear from Florida to the
Pacific Northwest (an area we’d never seen before), that we were going to go
for a few extra days. So, we traveled up to Seattle the Wednesday before the
cruise was due to set sail. After a long, arduous journey (over eight hours of
traveling on two different airplanes and two hours getting to our hotel), we
finally reached the fabulous Warwick Hotel where Steve and Carol Lawson of St.
Armands Travel had arranged rooms for us. The staff there showed us an
absolutely wonderful time during our stay and I highly recommend this hotel if
you are going to Seattle. It is centrally located and the valets will drive you
around to various restaurants and sights in the downtown area for nothing more
than a tip! Once we had dumped our luggage in the room, we were raring to go
out and see a few sights.
Our
first stop was the famous Pike Place
Market. Carol and Steve have told us about this place for years and Carol
maintains it’s one of her favorite places to visit! We were tired from the long
journey, but we still managed to hobble around the various flower, fruit and
fish stalls, visiting with the vendors and buying a few unique items like
garlic pepper jelly. Oh, yeah! Many of the vendors offered us samples of their
wares. In the first photo you can see Leah having a taste of a freshly cut
pineapple. The second photo shows some of the heaped up Dungeness crabs being
sold by one of the fish vendors. Leah and I both love crab and we were
literally salivating as we walked through the marketplace!
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When we finally
returned to the hotel, we were tired but ravenous. Leah was determined that we
were going to eat at the Crabpot restaurant down on the pier. She had seen an
advertisement talking about their “Seafeasts” which consisted of huge “pots” of
seafood such as Dungeness crab (the crab word was the most important part!) and
other kinds of seafood. So, after a brief rest, we had the wonderful Warwick
Hotel valet drive us down to the pier and we hobbled (our feet were already
killing us!) into the restaurant. It was indeed a wonderful “Seafeast” of food!
As tired as we were, we still managed to down huge amounts of Dungeness crab,
prawns, corn on the cob, oysters, clams, mussels, scallops, snow crab, salmon,
halibut, and new potatoes. It all came, as advertised, in a huge pot which they
dumped out on our butcher paper-covered table. Afterwards, we walked along the
pier to Ye Olde Curiosity Shop where we browsed among the souvenirs and saw
some mummies. The photo below is one of the pictures I took as the sun was
setting.
Puget Sound at Sunset (1107_13a)
The next
day, we headed out with Grayline
Tours for an all day excursion to Mount
Rainier National Park. Mount Rainier National Park is the 5th
oldest National Park in the nation and it celebrates its 100th year
in operation this year. The mountain itself is the 4th highest
mountain in the United States (14,408 feet high) and is actually an active
volcano encased in ice! It also has more glaciers than any other peak in the
country. The Indians of the region called the mountain “Tahoma,” which means
“the mountain that was God.”
We
learned along the way that a good portion of the National Park was still
inaccessible due to heavy snowfall. I believe our guide (and later a Park
Ranger) said that the road that enters another side of the park (which is
usually included on this tour), was still under about fifteen feet of snow! The
Grayline Tours to the mountain
had only started up for the season a few days before our trip. We had a
pleasant drive out to the park, nevertheless, and were quite excited when we
reached Paradise Park (about 4,500 feet up the side of the mountain), to find
the area not only covered in snow but a fresh snowfall happening just for us!
You can see a solid wall of snow behind Leah in the photo below… but what you
can’t see is that the wall extended about another ten feet or more higher! We
were in the parking lot at Paradise Park at that moment.
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All of the
facilities at Paradise Park were still closed, not due to open except on the
weekends for several more weeks yet, so our driver took us back down the
mountain to Longmire. We had lunch there at the National Park Inn and then
wondered around outside for awhile. Across the way from the Inn is a path that
leads to some old hot springs. Skunk cabbage was blooming everywhere in the
marshes there. The flower of the skunk cabbage is actually the little
green-yellow blossom you can see sticking up. The yellow part that looks more
like a flower is the hood. The leaves of the skunk cabbage will grow to be up
to four feet long! The next day, in Victoria, we saw a mature skunk cabbage
plant and the leaves really were that big. Later, throughout Alaska, we saw
many of the plants growing alongside the roads.
Skunk Cabbage growing at Longmire (1097_20a)
Alas, I
didn’t get to see a moose (and the rest of our trip became the Great Moose
Hunt!) but we did see lots of birds and some deer (all of which managed to turn
tail and run before I could snap more than their fleeing hindquarters with the
camera). All of the photos below were taken between Paradise Park and Longmire
except for the last one, which was taken behind the National Park Inn at
Longmire.
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On the
drive back to Seattle, our driver stopped in front of a yard full of these
wonderful sculptures. The ones pictured are made out of horseshoes (you can
probably see this better in the larger version of the photo, so don’t forget to
click on it to see the bigger version!). Alas, I didn’t get the name of the
artist.
Weird sculptures on the road to Mt. Rainier (1102_21a)
We spent
an entire day exploring the downtown Seattle area. The Seattle Art Museum was
good for a few hours. Their collection of art is small but very eclectic and we
were interested to see some of the ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek items they
have. Of course, they had a nice assortment of Northwestern Indian objects.
Lunch was at the Tir Na Nog Irish pub, a relatively new establishment in
downtown Seattle. We enjoyed the food there and can highly recommend you stop
in! We finished the day with a wonderful trip through the Seattle Aquarium and a viewing of
The Mysteries of Egypt at the IMAX theater. Some of my aquarium photos are
directly below. One of the most exciting parts of our trip to the Aquarium was
getting to see a baby sea otter. I did take photos but we were separated by a
water-splashed wall of glass and the baby looks like nothing more than a little
furball!
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Our adventure continues! Click the link
to go to Page Two!
Victoria,
British Columbia and our cruise begins…
Check out our Arkansas road trip page for more nature photography:
And our Colorado page for even more nature photography:
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