I don’t usually post pictures of me, mostly because I’m usually the one behind the lens, but a friend of mine took these while we were cavorting in the Juneau icefields of Alaska recently and it makes me smile to look at them.  Wow, that was some trip.

This was the final day of my trip “out West”.  It was not planned, since I had accelerated my return date, but my friend Marcia showed me around her adopted town, and so these images are a smattering of parks, food stands, fresh outdoor markets, the International Rose Test Garden, the Lan Su Chinese Garden, and downtown stores.  A 10,000 feet overview if you will.  The next morning I woke very early to catch the 6.30am flight back to Charleston, and gratefully touched down in my adopted home town about 13 hours later, with my baggage and on time.  Yes!!  Next major trip will be to South Africa again, in September.

The plan was to drive the Oregon coast for about a week, heading south from Cannon Beach with an old friend, a photographer buddy who lives in Bend.  He has an RV and loves to travel with his dog, so he picked me up from Portland airport and off we went.  Our plan was derailed today however when his dog got sick – the kind of sick you don’t need when you’re all traveling in an RV.  The only thing for him to do was to take his dog home and offload me to make my own way, which would have been absolutely fine under normal circumstances, but after the Alaska trip and living out of a suitcase for 10 days, I’m ready to go home.  Tomorrow I will spend the day with other friends in Portland before flying home early on Thursday.  Here are the only images I have of the Oregon coast – the rest will have to wait until next time.

Uploading one last image taken early this morning on a final walk-about.  The Rockwell Lighthouse, actually a hotel.

Sitka is a magical place – very “user-friendly.”  Everywhere is accessible, the people are friendly, it’s very hard to get lost, the weather has been great – a bit of everything.  People make jokes about the weather in Alaska, something like the jokes emblazoned across many t-shirts referencing a “drinking town with a fishing problem”, but we have been so fortunate.  We disembarked from the Liseron yesterday and felt like abandoned children.  We had come to love our temporary boat home and the crew that made it all work so well.  Anyway, since then, we have walked all over the town, explored the Sitka National Historical Park with all its totem poles, observed all the fishing activity, etc.  Here are a few more images from our last two days here.  Tonight it’s time to pack again, and on to the Oregon coast tomorrow.

I have taken so many images in the last few days and I really wanted to be able to post them as we went along, but since there was no mechanism for that due to non-existent internet service I am playing catch-up.  Here are some more, taking us up to yesterday – our last full day at sea.  The opportunity to photograph the humpback whale breaching was a wonderful gift.  Some of our crew who travel that route regularly throughout the summer have never seen this display. If I had to complain about anything, I would say that I would have preferred a soft evening light to have illuminated the water streaming from its body as it powered through the air 🙂

MV Liseron, The Boat Company’s converted minesweeper

Curious sea lions

For six days we have been cruising on The Boat Company’s converted minesweeper, Liseron, through narrow passages and channels, between the countless rocky islands that make up the South Eastern Alaskan inside passage.  I was hoping to be able to post regular images of our wanderings, but there is absolutely no cell or internet signal out there, so here are a few that will take you through the first three days or so.  The Boat Company is a non-profit whose mission is to educate more and more people about conserving and preserving for future generations one of the earth’s last great wild and beautiful places.  Check them out – they do an amazing job.  

In the afternoon, we took a helicopter tour of Juneau’s icefields.  We landed twice during the hour and a half long flight; once on a glacier next to a pool of clear blue water, and the other over a mile high in soft snow, seemingly on the top of the world. Indescribable beauty – hard to capture the vastness and awe of it all, but I gave it my best shot.

Well after anticipating this trip for over a year, I finally left Charleston on the east coast early yesterday morning and landed 16 hours later in Alaska’s capital, Juneau.  The sun was still shining, albeit faintly through an overcast sky.  I was pretty tired, having got up early to catch my flight anyway, but I ran into my friends eating dinner in the hotel dining room, so I ordered some dinner and a glass wine and joined them.  I fell into bed exhausted only to be woken by my friend Nancy who finally also made it across the continent from Charleston. We rented a car for a day and these are some of the places we visited today.

I was spoiled on Mother’s Day with sweetly penned cards and beautiful roses.  I decided to immortalize the roses by photographing them with my new macro lens, a 105mm Nikkor F2.8 VR beauty (meaningless I know to most), but anyway here are a couple of my first macro (close-up) photography attempts.