North to Alaska

The plan for our Alaska trip this year was to catch the ferry from Bellingham, Washington and take it to Whittier, Alaska.  Bellingham is north of Seattle.  We left Las Vegas and had a bout 6 days to get the ferry.  This meant our normal drive for 2 - 4 hours and park for a week or so would not work.  So we drove some 5 and 6 hour days.  Along the way we spent several nights in Costco parking lots and then fill up with gasoline and head out.  We did stop near Sacramento to see some friends we'd made on last summer's trip to China.  We met up with Carmen, Betty and Stella.  We had a wonderful visit.

Also along the way we stopped to see another friend from the China tour in the Portland, OR area.  We were actually able to park in front of her house and spent the night.  Meet Dorothy;

We arrived in Bellingham 2 days before our departure on the ferry which gave us the time to do laundry, empty the refrigerator and prep for the 4+ days on the ferry.

The ferry was nicer than we expected...not as nice as a cruise ship but not to bad.  We had an inner room for sleeping and it was bigger than we expected.

 Initially we were told we could leave the car connected to Harvey but later learned we needed to disconnect so we could back on to the ferry.  Backing onto a ferry was fun!

We had a few stops on the way and were able to get off the ferry for a short period.  We had already been to a few places but it was good to get off the boat.

The trip was beautiful.

But after 4+ days of basically the same scenery the trip got long.  The ship had a movie each night but we learned they only had 3 movies. And we had seen one of them.

We got off the ship about 6AM in Whittier, had breakfast at the only place in town that served breakfast and were on our way to see the Kenai Peninsula.