Alaska The Beautiful

Hi all, well as you can guess by the photo's I am back from Alaska, I call it Alaska the beautiful, for one reason and one reason only, Alaska is beautiful. Getting there is a bit of a drag, my family and I started out at 5:30 am at Philadelphia International Airport and boarded a flight to Seattle a six hour flight,( which I will talk about in a moment) Arriving in Seattle we had a 3 hour layover till our next flight on Alaskan Airlines to Anchorage another 3 hour flight. Actually all went smoothly, the flights were on schedule the luggage was transferred from one plane to the other without incident, the takeoffs and landings were smooth and easy and even the turbulence going over the Rockies was at a minimum. Okay your right anyone who knows me knows I always complain about something. We flew to Seattle on US Airway, It all started when we paid $55.00 for all suitcases, not extra suitcases, but all suitcases then we were no sooner leveling off after takeoff when the flight attendants came down the isle offering liquid refreshments, anything from water to juice, coffee to soda all for a nominal fee of two Dollars, I started to think "hummmm". Now we are about two hours into the flight, the belly starts making strange sounds from way down, again the somewhat ageing flight attendants come down the isle offering sustenance for $7.00 of course, I believe it was what they called a Turkey Sausage on what they called a roll, oh yes they also had a bag of peanuts with the turkey I counted 7 nuts in the bag, um um good. Now I totally understand that this economy dictates cutbacks, raising prices and ways to make ends meet but can anyone tell me why when my wife and daughter were chilled and asked for a pillow and blanket they were told it would cost $7.00 apiece, now I thought that was a bit over doing it. Okay so much for the rants, now for the raves, landing in Anchorage, we were met by the ship companies (Royal Caribbean) representative, it was at this time I realized I was on vacation,because at this point I was treated like royalty, never had to touch a suitcase, and was chauffeured from place to place not told what to do but asked what we were doing next. Sounds great huh? it was. Well what I plan on doing is show several pictures of the trip on each blog and explain what you see. Today's blog pictures show Top Left: the Mendenhall Glacier, Top Right: me, my wife Anna, my daughter Lora and her husband Ed on the Mendenhall Glacier, Middle Left: Aerial View of a Mountain taken from a Helicopter, Middle Right: Town of Ketchikan, Our Stateroom