Massive sailboat

There is a HUGE sailboat tied up at the harbor right now...I took the top picture just for scale.  It's the Athena, a 295 ft triple masted, multi-deck sailboat.  And she dwarfs every other boat in the marina.  For reference, she is 9 times longer than Samsara, the sailboat we lived on in Maryland.  Athena has a width (beam) of 40 feet - so it's also wider than the Samsara was long.  And in case you're in the market, she's also rumored to be for sale, for a mere 95 million dollars, she can be yours!

 

Yeah, we could live in that. 

Smokey sunset

While I was in Boston Steve took these amazing sunset pictures.  There was a wildfire burning somewhere over the mountains and the smoke was making very orange sunsets for a couple of days.

Nice pictures Steve!

Weekend bike ride

 

Sunday was a beautiful day, so we went for a long bike ride, 16.2 miles total.  Our route took us through the Brotherhood Bridge area of the Mendenhall Valley (our starting point is in the photo above), up to the Glacier, then over to Montana Creek and around the campground where we camped a few weeks ago.  It was in the 60s for the ride, but by mid-afternoon yesterday it was into the upper 70s and maybe even low 80s. 

There's a few salmon in this creek (can't see them in this photo though!)

We were hoping to see bears up near the glacier since the salmon are spawning, but we didn't see any.  We did see lots of salmon though, and some eagles and lots of blooming fireweed (it's bright pink!).

Look closely to see the salmon...

Steve with his new bike.

Me, blending in with the pink flowers?

Boston sights and photos

I'm back home in Juneau, YAY!  The conference was a lot of fun, but I'm really glad to be home to cool weather, mountains, and Steve and Seca.  I leave again in about a week for a 2 week research cruise.  Then when I get back, summer is almost over, how sad!

I didn't take very many pictures in Boston - it was too hot to carry around a camera and most of the time I was so busy at the conference there wasn't time for sight-seeing.  Here's a couple...

There were a lot of churches and graveyards full of dead historic people.  They reminded me of Charleston.  I don't remember which one this was from, sorry...

Part of the skyline of Boston, from near the North End (where all the cute little Italian restaurants are).  I walked parts of the Freedom Trail through the city and into the North End.  Very scenic, would have been better if it wasn't 95 degrees and humid.

A beautiful statue outside the Old North Church (where Paul Revere hung the 'one if by land, two if by sea' lanterns way back in 1775). 

The inside of the Old North Church.  They have boxes for the congregants to sit in, in the old English style, instead of rows of pews.  This was so that you could close the door to your box and have a little heater inside to help stay warm in the cold winter.  This was originally a private church, and members paid huge amounts of money for their 'box'. 

Humid

Ugh, this heat and humidity is no fun.  I did figure out the bus and metro system, since walking 1.4 miles each way was not going to work.  Monday morning I was very sweaty when I got to the meeting...today I brought a clean shirt to change into and the bus was air conditioned so it was much better.

I don't have a good way to upload pictures so that will have to wait until I get back.  The conference is pretty good, I'm meeting some interesting people and getting to catch up with old friends.

Exploring on Sunday was fun, there's a lot of history in this town that I would appreciate more if I remembered anything from American history in high school...

Boston

I'm in Boston for the week, and Steve's holding down the fort at home.  I'm here for a conference on stock assessment modeling...pretty excited for it to start tomorrow.

The trip here was fine - 12 hours total travel time, so, not awful given the distance.  For the flight between Juneau and Seattle I had the dreaded middle seat - between two giant men.  Gene was on my left and "big Vito" (not his real name) was on my right.  Big Vito was a nice, hairy behemoth with small hams for hands.  He would have been a believable thug on the Sopranos.  But, they were both nice and funny and it made for a fun flight.  For the Seattle to Boston leg I had a window seat and there middle seat was open.  The woman sharing my row works at the Sam Adams Brewery, so she was fun to talk to and said she could help me score brewery tour tickets if I wanted.   I was really happy to not be sitting next to whomever was clipping their nails - yuck, who does that in public in an enclosed space??

Some first impressions of Boston - holy cow it's hot and humid here!  That's going to be tough to get used to.  And it is dark at night, even with the city lights.  It hasn't gotten fully dark in Juneau in a long time.  It was weird to see stars again.

Today I am going to go explore a bit.  My college roommate lives in town so I am going to meet up with her and her husband (also a college friend of mine) later today.  They live at a place with a pool, which is going to feel great given the temperature outside!

Oddities

At Steve's work they keep the police scanner on all day.  Apparently yesterday the buzz was about a man who showed up at one of the state buildings here in town...demanding to see the Queen.  Queen Elizabeth, to be specific.  Apparently it caused quite a stir.

Another thing I find funny whenever I hear it on the radio - a commercial for a local furniture store (who shall remain nameless).  Their slogan is "If you didn't buy it at [local store's name], you might be paying too much".   Might.  Might be paying too much.  I mean, probably not, but you know, maybe. 

Impromptu camping

We decided sort of at the last minute on Thursday night to go camping for the weekend.  That's probably the preferred method around here, since you can wait to see what the forecast is for the weather before you commit.  This weekend, the prediction was for cool and cloudy but no rain. 

We picked a campsite up at the Mendenhall campground, which is on the opposite side of Mendenhall Lake from the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center (and thus opposite all the tourists as well).  But, given it's so close to the glacier and that there's icebergs floating in the lake, the breeze through the campsite was downright cold.  We were pretty bundled up all weekend - long underwear and several layers on top - in July.  It was nice in the tent at night though!

One of the downsides to the campground is that there's a shooting range up the road a bit, and the gunshots echo off the mountains.  Seca was pretty freaked out at times (it wasn't constant shooting, it seemed to happen in the morning a bit and again in the evening a bit), oh and there were some fireworks being set off by someone in the area too, which didn't help at all.  End result - Seca spent one night in the truck, managed to climb on top of the folded down passenger seat and get stuck and then peed on the carpet in the truck (I'm pretty confident the peeing was an accident caused by her stuck position).  However, that's a nasty smell and we're still trying to get it out. 

Beaver, coming by to check us out.

We did some sort walks around the campground area with Seca, and a lot of relaxing.  There was a small pond with a beaver in it.  Seca didn't seem to notice the beaver swimming around, but the beaver came to check us out and kept slapping his tail on the water.

It was a nice weekend, but I really wish we didn't have a mess in the car to deal with!

Green green garden

Our little garden is growing!  We're having salad with dinner tonight.  There's two kinds of leaf lettuce (that's the bushy stuff), spinach, two kinds of basil (italian and thai) and flat leaf parsley (which you never see in stores here and I like a lot more than the curly stuff).