I don't even know where to begin, so much has happened in my first week on the Wind. I arrived on Monday to Vancouver. We sailed through the Inside Passage on Tuesday, then to Sawyer Glacier on Wednesday. Yesterday we went to Skagway during the day and Haines at night. We hit Juneau today and tomorrow we'll go to Ketchikan. I've had such a full week, it's as if I were a passenger. Youth Counselors don't really do cruise staff duties here, so when we're not in program (at sea), we're off duty.
This morning I went on a whale watching tour. Unlike the ones I did through Sea World, the whales here were close and there were lots of them. We saw humpbacks left, right, and center. It was awesome. We also saw Stellar sea lions and bald eagles. Then, when I got back to my room, I was just in time to catch two of the girls I work with on their way to a salmon bake. So I went along, and had a wonderful lunch. Mmmm, good. I ate reindeer sausage and roasted marshmallows on a real stick! Not a hanger, but a wood stick, like from a tree! Plus there were huge, steep, green, heavily tree-ed mountainsides rising up, with skinny waterfalls trailing down them.
Yesterday, five of us rented a car and drove to the YUKON!!! We saw the world's smallest desert, which is in Carcross. Weird to see sand in such a cold, otherwise green place. I forget how it formed, sorry. We went to the Yukon capital, White Horse, and I finally saw a Tim Hortons (It's a doughnut/coffee/sandwich/soup shop for all you non-Canadians). Right near the ship, we saw salmon spawning in a shallow creek. You could reach out and touch them, they were so close. And apparently, lots of morons do, which disrupts their reproduction. So if you are ever really close to spawning salmon, show a little respect for Mother Nature, please.
The day before, as we sailed to Sawyer Glacier, we took the kids outside to watch it. Parts of it were deep blue, because the pressure of the compacted ice squeezes all the oxygen out of it. There were seals on ice floes as we passed by. They looked like Harbor seals, and someone who seemed to know confirmed it for me. As we stood on deck 11 and looked down at them, my lead, a really cool girl named Donna, got the kids to bark at the seals. For those of you who didn't grow up working at SeaWorld, let me inform you that seals, being more solitary creatures, rarely bark. You're thinking of sea lions, who are very social, and therefore, also very vocal. But I guess I can let it pass. It's a little like one of the Canadians I work with telling one of the kids nachos were small tacos! I didn't know what a quarry was until Jenn told me. It's all about where you grow up, I guess.
Tomorrow, I'm planning on going mountain biking with some of the girls. I LOVE ALASKA! It's so beautiful, in such a rugged way.
That's all the email time I can afford right now. I'll email again soon.
~~~Love always, Genoa~~~
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