Okay, true confession time. I didn’t want to go on this vacation. Not even a little bit.
When my husband told me that we would be going to Alaska, I said that I’d rather stay home. He said it was a once in a life-time opportunity (the trip was free) and I said “no thanks.”
I live near mountains, I live near snow. Why would I want to travel across the continent just to see more of the same thing? Besides, I was busy … quite honestly, I was overwhelmed with just how busy life was at the moment, and I didn’t see how dropping everything to go on vacation could possibly help.
I whined, I fussed, I said that I didn’t want anything to do with it, then I finally caved and agreed to go, but I refused to do any of the planning. I was sure that Alaska had nothing to offer this New England girl.
I was wrong. He was right.
Alaska was just what I needed to get my perspective back.
To the lover of wilderness,
Alaska is one of the most
wonderful countries in the world.
~ John Muir
Alaska is simply a place that is incapable of being captured in photographs.
It has enormous mountains, fantastic glaciers, abundant wildlife of all kinds, and space as I have never experienced it before. Yet despite my best photography efforts, you really can’t see any of that in the pictures I took.
I completely lost all sense of proportion while we were there. The humpback whales directly below my feet were too large to fit in a photograph, but yet they were also 10 stories down. The glacier that radiated cold so sharp that I put on a second coat, seemed close enough to touch, but it was actually miles away. The mountains that loomed on both sides of our boat dwarfed everything up to, and including the sky, which appeared to stay a dull gray at all times so that it wouldn’t steal the show from the beautiful vibrant blue of the icebergs.
The trees were bigger, the towns farther apart, the water colder, and the air cleaner. The pace is slower, the people gentler, and even the rocks themselves are more interesting than those in the lower 48.
If you have time to waste, you can see the full slideshow here: Alaska 2012 but you would do much better to simply Go! My pictures don’t do it justice. Just know that it is a land worthy of the trip.
