Rest & Relaxation

I returned to the states on 3 September, just in time for the four day Labor Day weekend. After I in-processed with the base , Michael took me down to Valdez for my R&R. Valdez is gorgeous, with mountains, glaciers, waterfalls, and wildlife. Valdez is eight hours away from North Pole, so we had a long drive down. After six months where the fastest speed limit is 60 kilo/hour, (less than 40mph) driving at 60mph was a bit scary. Michael said I made him motion sick.

The first day, we took a glacier cruise. Michael is my camera man, but all these pictures are mine. :)

One of the glaciers we approached was the Columbia glacier. It had created so many icebergs, the closest we could come to it was ten miles.
Our very able Captain piloted the boat around several enormous icebergs. Seeing them made me wonder, how big was the one that sunk the Titanic? The Captain announced there are only two other places in the entire world that have icebergs this size: Greenland and Antarctica.

Let's get a picture taken with an iceberg! :)
We did see some wildlife on the cruise as well. Very few of my pictures were in focus, though, so I'll have to get Michael to upload some of his pictures soon.
The next day, we went out looking for waterfalls and then took a hike.

The only wildlife (other than birds) we saw on our hike. This porcupine was really small; smaller than a volleyball. Doesn't it look all soft and cuddly? I was close enough, I could have reached out and petted it. (I didn't, though.)
On our return trip, we stopped at Worthington Glacier. Do you see the black oval to the bottom left of the glacier? That is an ice cave.

Of course, we had to hike out to it. The next picture is actually three pictures stitched together. I didn't take these pictures with the intent to stitch them into a panorama, and photoshop wanted to skew Michael out of shape. This still doesn't do it justice as to its size. Michael is at least twenty feet away, and that's only the top half of the opening. We didn't go inside the ice cave.

Here is the wall of the ice cave, at least, the wall where the roof had already collapsed.
There were several magpies in the parking lot at Worthington glacier. They were cleaning the bugs off the parked cars. One of them was very vocal. I have never seen one that vocal. It chattered non-stop.

All in all, it was a wonderful trip. Michael and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.