Portage Glacier

When we first got off the plane in Alaska the kids started commenting on how it smells.  I thought the air was so fresh and seemed amazing that I was wondering what they had to complain about.  Then one of them said that it smells like Christmas.  I guess they forgot what it was like to live in Washington. 

Being outdoors and in nature with the family was really the best part of the trip. They whole time it was in the 70's and not the least bit humid.  I loved it.  I made sure to take advantage of that and even went on a couple jogs before everyone was up in the mornings.

We landed around 11pm but we weren't tired at all and it wasn't dark.  Which was good because we had no place to stay.  The kids were troopers though and we dragged our suitcases the 30 minute walk to the base hotel.  I called three times a day everyday for about a week to ask for a room and they never had space (they wouldn't take reservations either) but luckily when we arrived a room was available.  It was a their temporary family housing and perfect for us.  It was basically a small house with a kitchen and everything.  But by the time we got there (the nice desk clerk drove us in her own car), it was after midnight.  We thought we might be camping randomly in a field so we were thrilled to have a room.  We ate dominos for dinner at 1pm.

After arriving there was a flight posted back to Japan just two days later.  We were a little bummed about that but didn't want to end up getting stuck and thought we should just cram in as much as we can and take that flight to Japan.  So we ended up doing o ton on our first day.

We looked at our list of what we wanted to do and the temple was out because it was closed so we went to the next thing everyone really wanted to do, and that was to go to a glacier.  

So we went on a beautiful drive toward portage glacier and went on our first hike on the Byron Glacier trail.

 It was pretty easy, a great starter hike for the day.

Bob took a picture of me taking a picture of the kids.

We just let the kids run around and play on the glacier for a while.  I think it was one of the kids favorite activities for the trip.

We also got a pamphlet and read all about what a glacier is and what makes it different from snow.

 I thought the scenery was beautiful.

 Calista was hesitant to walk on it at first but she became brave pretty quickly.

 The girls even made cute little glacier-men.

Once we were done there we checked out a little museum and then went through the Whittier tunnel.  This tunnel has room for one lane of traffic but is used to go both directions and is also used by a train.  All of which we had to wait for before we got to go through.  We sat for about 30 minutes in the car waiting, I think we just missed our turn.

I didn't get any pictures but there was a little town on the other side of the tunnel we checked out.