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.