Philoking.com

It’s Wednesday, I am sitting in our stateroom taking in some quite choppy seas. As far as I can see, which isn’t far, there are 8-10 foot swells until the fog line. This is about what I expected from the ocean in this area, we left Tracy Arm Fjord this morning heading for Ketchikan tomorrow morning and at the moment it’s slow going and pretty rough.

We are totally enjoying our vacation however. Monday morning we arrived in Juneau Alaska and although it was quite wet, we found ourselves totally enjoying our day. We started with a trip to the Mendenhal Glacier. We took a not so scenic bus ride out there, it was raining and the windows were pretty foggy. Although we got a great verbal tour, we couldn’t see much of what was being pointed out.

When we arrived at the glacier things were quite different. The glacier was magnificent. We caught a bear fishing for Salmon at the creek, a Bald Eagle high in the trees and took in the beautiful Alaskan Scenery on our way back to the port.

When we returned to the port we waited a few minutes before we were off on our whale watching adventure. Our guide took us about 20 minutes out into the channels until we sighted these incredible creatures just off the boat. In all we saw about a half dozen Humpback Whales. The trademark spout of air and water, the big dives, the displays of Dorsal fins, it was amazing to see.

We sailed through the night after Juneau and when we woke up we were in Skagway Alaska. After rambling around town for a few minutes and even coming across a Starbucks (and a $6.75 White Chocolate Mocha, heh) we took off in a small bus for a ride up the White Pass. Our tour guide took us to the old cemetery, thrilled us with stories about Soapy Smith and other local color, and then we headed out the pass and eventually into Canada. The scenery was simply breathtaking. I can’t imagine how people managed to cross that territory in the gold rush.

After making it back to the boat, we woke up in Tracy Arm Fjord and the Sawyer Glaciers, these were pretty incredible as well. We sailed around and past our boat’s sister ship the "Star Princess" and seeing that ship against the glacier and mountain back drop really puts the size of the country into perspective.

That finds us back where we are now, in heart of the Inside Passage making our way to Ketchikan, then Victoria British Columbia and eventually back in Seattle Washington early Saturday morning. I am sure there will be more photos to come, but I have picked out a select few to show what we have seen and done on this vacation so far and uploaded them to Flickr. You can view these photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/philoking 

I hope you enjoy them as much as I have. I going to check out the email I haven’t looked at in four days, see what’s going on and I’ll be back to the world on Saturday. Adios!

I expect this will be an interesting little series of posts over the next month. In less than 3 weeks, my wife and I, accompanied by my two sisters, a boyfriend and my parents…are leaving for a 7 day cruise up the Alaskan coast.

If you don’t follow the blog closely, you might not know that I am an avid amateur photographer. I have been preparing gear for this trip for quite some time, and I am looking forward to putting it all to use. I have done geek bag show and tells before, but this is more focused. I want to talk about the gadgets I will bring and how I expect to use them, then over the course of the vacation, I will blog about each day and what I actually used or needed, or wished I would have brought!

This will be a very well documented trip. Besides your standard point and shoot camera, a Sony 7.3 Megapixel in this case, and a decent digital SLR setup:

• Canon 40D 10 Megapixel Digital SLR with Battery Grip
• Canon 100mm f2.8 USM Macro Lens
• Canon 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM Zoom Lens
• Canon 50mm f1.8 Lens
• Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 Ultra-Wide Lens
• Bogen 3001NB Tripod Legs
• Bogen Ball Head
• Bogen Monopod

I had a hard time deciding if I was going to get a long zoom lens for wildlife. I am perhaps still waffling a little bit, but I decided against it. I do have a 75-300mm Canon lens that will be going in my wife’s bag that I can use in a pinch.

I am also bringing my Macbook Pro with a camera card reader for downloading photos, two 2GB and one 4GB Compact Flash cards and a Garmin handheld GPS for geo-tagging photos.

Of course the usual array of MP3 players, game devices, hard drives and other junk will tag along.

Follow this series to see what and how I use it, and what I wish I would have brought!