Alaska looked like what I once dreamed Colorado would look like: tree-covered mountains crowned with snow, fast-running streams and thick forests. Like this:


Then there were the incredible mountains and glaciers coming down to the ocean.
This is Resurrection Bay at Seward:


And, of course, there were glaciers


and bear


and lovely forest trails


I could probably just upload most of my 300+ pictures to show you the amazing diversity -- and we just saw a tiny corner. We could not work out a trip to Sitka, which was the capital when Russia owned Alaska, and which was #1 on my list of things to do. Unfortunately, when there were flights available, there were no hotel rooms in Sitka, and vice versa. So we've already decided to take a long weekend for that.

I have many stories to tell. Oh, and pictures. Did I mention pictures?

I took this picture of an eclipse of the moon from my front yard. The night was dark, and it got substantially darker while the eclipse was going on.

It was a sales meeting, but a very different one. We stayed in a quaint little hotel close to the White Salmon River. We went over all the stuff we are going to do at our national sales meeting in a couple of weeks. Then we did this:




What a rush!!!! Also, what a shock when the 40 degree water hits you. We practiced "hold on, get down!", which is the cue to quit paddling and hang on for dear life. I was really having trouble lining up my paddle, holding on to the outside rope, holding on to the inside rope, and getting my feet anchored under the pontoons so I would have a fighting chance of staying aboard. Time after time, the guide would yell "Hold on, get down!" and I would still be swinging my paddle while everyone else had hunkered down. I really thought he was going to make me walk around the falls but either he had started to like me for yelling "Yeeee-hah!" every time the water got a little rough, or he had started to dislike me and wanted to see me flip out of the raft. So I was very proud to see that I did the best job of keeping the paddle where it was supposed to be. I was just saving my good performance for when I needed it. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Also, I don't know if you can see it, but the men were screaming like little girls and the women were laughing. A little while later, the women had to sit on the very front of the raft to go down the Texas Bull Rider. (Which I have actually done. On a mechanical bull. When I wore size 1 jeans and the guy ran the machine ve - ry slow - ly so he could watch me bouncing for a long time.)


It was a lot easier to stay on that mechanical bull.

Several years ago a friend referred to these shafts of light as "angel slides" and it was such a perfect description that I have used it ever since. I can just see a group of giggling little angels sliding down, landing with a splash in the water, and floating back up to the cloud to do it again.