Inflatable Sheep

Betty and I are headed for Alaska the first week of September which coincides nicely with my birthday. I've never been on a cruise before and am very excited. We're looking at videos, selecting excursions at various ports of call, and reading up on Alaskan history.

I've also been looking at Flickr photos of other people's experiences on the cruise. For even more excitement building, I've got the Princess cruise ship widget up so I can see webcams on the bridges of various ships, a quarter of which are Alaska bound.

I don't care at all for the touristy things, and I can't imagine small Alaskan towns with a native populations of 800 or so being innundated with 6,000 cruise ship visitors. Betty and I hope to avoid them (ha) and are on the lookout for the nature stuff as Alaska seems beautiful from the photos I've seen. We hope to catch a helicopter ride to the Mendenhall Glacier and I particularly want to see the Bald Eagles.

I was debating buying extra memory cards or a small hard drive to store my photos, but I understand from other travelers that you can have your photos downloaded and burned to a cd on the ship.

In the meantime, I've sent an expedited request for my birth certificate from South Carolina, after which I'll go to the post office and get an expedited passport. We've already booked and paid for our flight to and from Seattle, the hotel in Seattle, and our cruise. With that expense taken care of, I be poor. No new books, no new CDs, no new anything until after September. I'm losing weight since I've been on my diabetic diet. It will be just my luck to lose enough that I need the next size smaller clothes by September. I was hoping to get by with just buying a dress (of which I have none) and shoes as the Converses might not match the dress. Dang.

We did one splurge and that's to get a mini-suite on the ship. So nice to have that balcony. I may never leave the room.

I would wish for September to be here now, but I know from experience that the journey is more than half the fun, so I'm just treasuring these days until then.