Just got back from 10 days in Alaska and didn't touch a computer in all that time. Serious withdrawal for the first 2 days, then didn't think about it until the last day.

I'll post some pictures on the Discussions page in a couple days but wanted to say Hi.

The gardens throughout Alaska and the two 'southern' cities we were in - Seattle and Vancouver - were lush and beautiful, but 2 cities really stood out. Vancouver and Ketchikan. Vancouver has parks and city-corner gardens everywhere, including a botanical garden with more hummingbirds that I've ever seen in one place. But every yard seems to overflow with cottage style gardens as well. I was enchanted with the place. Ketchikan, and to a smaller extent Skagway, in Alaska had small gardens everywhere as well. The delphiniums were huge everywhere we turned! Throughout Alaska a plant called Fire Weed covers every open field with tall spikes of magenta flowers. They told us that as soon as the Fire Weed starts to die off, they know summer is just about over and the cold weather is about to set in.

We saw lots of great things besides the flowers, of course, and I would recommend an Alaskan cruise to anyone. I've not been a big cruise fan in the past but this one changed my mind. It was a good way to see little bits of a huge place that would have been difficult to sample any other way. We plan to go back in a few years (when the Northern Lights should peak, around 2011 or 2012) and will do that trip by land further north than we were this time.

The glacier cruising days were a highlight of the trip, especially Glacier Bay National Park. We were able to watch icebergs calving and saw lots of wildlife: swans, moose, grizzly bears (they call them Brown Bears there), black bears, sea otters, seals, dolphins, humpback whales, orcas, mountain sheep, hundreds of eagles and salmon. Salmon in the water, salmon leaping out of the water, salmon in the mouths of bears and in the talons of eagles. Smoked salmon, salmon spread, grilled salmon and baked salmon, too! Those eagles and bears know what they are doing! Yum.

As I said, we weren't cruisers before but had such a good time on this one that we already booked the next one! Anyone up for a cruise to Cabo San Lucas in February out of San Diego? Maybe we can make it a GardenWeb cruise ;~)) and visit every garden on the Mexican Riviera!

Kate