Alaska Part 2

More Alaska!  On Tuesday we enjoyed a beautiful walk.  I liked this sign.

We played with rocks by this creek that had special meaning for Zeke.  Ben and Karen's family had come to take pictures by it last fall and Zeke stepped on what he thought was a rock, but was actually ice and fell though to the water.  Their family pictures were postponed.  

We took some pictures and, luckily, no one fell in the water.

We then walked around Potter's Marsh which was gorgeous!  We saw a great horned owl (lousy picture), but it was impressive!  We're assuming it was injured or something because it shouldn't be out in the daytime.

We got to see little salmon in a creek by this boardwalk.  So cool!  

On Wednesday we went to the Alaska Zoo.  

It was charming and small, full of Alaskan animals like this musk ox!

 

Many of our evenings were spent helping Curtis and Kristi with wedding stuff.  Here is an incredible picture we took as we were leaving their house.  At 11 pm!  Land of the midnight sun.  Or nearly midnight rainbows.

And THIS is a view from Curtis and Kristi's bedroom window on a clear day!  Look at those mountains!

Thursday we were blessed with a beautiful, sunny day!  We borrowed bikes from a family in Ben and Karen's ward and we all went for a ride along the coastal trail.  It was gorgeous! 

We stopped for a picnic lunch by the airport.  The girls loved picking the clovers.

The planes came so close!  Every time one would take off Alice would run to one of us to cover her ears.

After lunch we went down to a beach of rocks.  It was really fun to look at all the rocks.

We saw a buried car!  That's the front tire, bumper, and engine block.  The rear tires were there too.  How crazy is that?

Friday was preparing for the wedding and Saturday was the wedding itself.  Curtis managed to have time that morning to show Mike a house he is remodeling and getting ready to flip.  It is further out of town and up in the mountains.  They had a visitor while they were there.  A black bear was under the deck by the house (this is a bird's eye view).  The kids were all jealous that Mike got to see a bear. 

The wedding was lovely.  We're praying that the temple will be in Matthew and Savannah's future, but the ceremony was beautiful.  Short and touching.  Here is Matthew and Savannah Skyping with his sister Emily who is on her mission.  Her mission president (President Guffey!) let her Skype in for the wedding.  When Matthew found out she was "there" he got choked up.  It was really sweet.  

Okay, there is no picture.  I didn't take a single one of the bride and groom.  I fought with my computer to get some from Kristi, but no luck.  Beautiful cousins.

After the ceremony we took down the decorations in the ceremony hall.  Curtis built this beautiful arch.  Here's us putting it to good use.

It works great as a backdrop for cute girls too.  Bridget is doing a princess bride dance or something.

No other pictures, but we had a great time at the reception.  We had a dinner catered by the Olive Garden and it was quite good.  I had to cut the kids off at two breadsticks because heaven knows they would have eaten 6 each.  And there was dancing!  Karen and I owned that dance floor, much to the embarrassment of our teenage daughters.  Eventually they joined in and had fun too.  It was such a blast! 

All good things must come to an end.  We left the next day after church.

It was a fantastic visit!  Alaska was beautiful and it was wonderful being with family.  Lydia keeps saying she wants to move to Alaska, but really she just wants to move close to her cousins.  It was a great family vacation!

Alaska! Part 1

We took a family vacation up to Anchorage, Alaska.  Our nephew, Matthew, was getting married so we thought "what a great excuse to go!"  Two of Mike's brothers and their families live in Anchorage.  Curtis works for ConocoPhillips and Ben works for BP.  

The trip out was rough, but until someone invents teleportation that's what you get.  Alice happily looking over her seat at Mike.  

The Chicago airport had a really cool play area (a bit well loved, but cool nonetheless) built by the Chicago Children's Museum where we were happy to spend a good share of our layover.  Alas, no pictures, but if you're ever in the Chicago airport looking for somewhere for the kids, check it out.  I like this picture from the Chicago airport though!  

We stayed with Ben and Karen, since they weren't the ones preparing for a wedding and they have a pretty good history of hosting us (we stayed with them a week last summer when we landed homeless in Houston) and we kinda like them.  After getting to Ben and Karen's at 5 am and letting Alice and I catch up on a few hours of sleep (because I cannot sleep worth a darn on a plane) we went to Mirror Lake.  It was gorgeous!  The weather was sunny and beautiful, the mountain by the lake was just amazing, and to have all three Johnson families together was such a blast.  We had kayaks (Evelyn loved the kayaks), canoes, and inner tubes.  But best of all...cousins!

18 yr old Ashley and Evelyn chilling in tubes. 

Canoe ride.  

Lydia, 14 yr old Elizabeth, and 13 yr old Scott.  Uncle Curtis photo bombing in the back.

6 yr old Zeke, 9 yr old Parker, and Alice.  Look at the mountain!  It was beautiful!

Elizabeth, Bridget, and Alice hanging out in a tree.

After our day at the lake Curtis took the older cousins to float a creek, while we got everyone else showered and ready for dinner.  Uncle Curtis, Scott, 11 yr old Troy, Lydia, and Elizabeth. (Isaac was invited, but he was beat, and Anna who is 15 was flying home from Utah).

After church the next day we went to touch the temple, which is in the same parking lot!  Zeke, Parker, Isaac, Anna, and our girls.  Notice the grey, drizzly sky.  It stayed that way for the next 4 days.  Oh well.

After church we had a big Johnson dinner at Curtis and Kristi's house with everyone including Matthew's cute fiancé, Savannah.  Elizabeth made us an Alaska cake!

AND we got to see the Robinson's who we knew in Brisbane before they got transferred to Alaska!  Kristi knew we would want to see them and invited them for dinner too.  What a treat!

On Monday we drove out of Ben and Karen's neighborhood and saw a moose and her baby!  You can't see the baby in the picture and really you can only tell it's a moose if you squint your eyes, but we saw a moose!  Alaskan trip success!

We drove about an hour went to see a glacier.  The drive out to Portage was absolutely gorgeous!  These pictures don't do the scenery any justice.  Vast mudflats and ocean and distant mountains on one side.

And beautiful waterfalls coming off the mountains right by the road on the other side.

We got to Portage, but it was too cloudy to see the glacier in the distance.  Lucky for us a piece of it broke off and was floating in the water right by the visitor's center.  Look how blue it is!  Science lesson: the presence of air bubbles is what gives snow and ice their white appearance, but because glaciers have been compressed for thousands of years there are no air bubbles and hence are blue, just as oceans are blue.  Fascinating!  This glacial ice berg was about the size of a large house.

The visitor's center there had a great museum. 

We stopped at the city Girdwood on our way home to go on a beautiful hike.  A little drizzly.

Ben and Karen wanted to show us this incredible hand tram!  I've never seen anything like it!  It spanned a gorge with a river below it.  

What a rush!

And of course we had to stop for ice cream!  This place was known for their neat Alaskan flavors.  Mike is eating Moose tracks and I'm eating honey and fireweed (a native flower).

Here is a picture of fireweed.  So pretty!  Named such because it is the first plant to grow after a fire.  Karen told me when the flowers bloom at the top of its stalk it means summer is over.  

More interesting Alaskan plants.  This is cow parsnip.  A huge plant!  This one is a good 5 feet high.  This stuff is like poison ivy, so don't be taken in by its lovely Queen Anne's lace like flowers.  Beware of those giant leaves!

This was one of my favorites.  Creeping dogwood.  Aptly named, because it looks like small dogwood flowers growing on the ground.

This was cool!  It looked like a miniature forest of pine trees!  And... I forgot it's name.

Fourth of July

The kids and I went down to Cincinnati for a couple days in honor of Oma's birthday.  Oma had some coupons for Gold Star Chili burning in her pocket so we went for lunch.  I LOVE a good Cincinnati style coney dog, although many would say it's an acquired taste.  The kids thought they were pretty good, but I think they liked the little packets of oyster crackers better.

Opa gave us a great Family Home Evening lesson about the Children of Israel and the brass serpent.  And he brought out his snake skins. So neat!

Oma showed us around the Donut Trail.  Happiness is a good donut!

And Evelyn lost her tooth!

Fun in the tree.

Opa took us to feed little horses at Eddie's house.

Cuddles.

Kids on the bearskin rug.  At first Alice was a little unsure, but she warmed up to it pretty quickly.  

Opa made an apple pie for Oma's Fourth of July birthday.  And we ate it for breakfast!  

Happy Birthday, Oma!

We drove back home after pie so we could be with Mike, since he had the day off too.  We went to watch fireworks that night with some friends and I absolutely love this picture!