Last Day of 2016

The year is just about over and for some people it can't come soon enough. It has been an odd year for sure. Donald Trump was elected President. Among many celebrity deaths were Carrie Fisher and Kenny Baker my Star Wars heroes of old. Also among those we lost was my Uncle Randy. I suppose its not a year I'm sad to see end.

Highlights for the year include:

• Cruised to Alaska and found a few geocaches
• Visited Canada and found geocaches in British Columbia and Yukon Territory
• 4th season of Blazers season tickets
• Saw Paul McCartney in concert
• Saw Guns n' Roses in concert
• Attended the World's Fair of Money

Caches were few and far between this year, but the best included:

• International Falls & Border - Alaska/BC 
• Tutshi Memorial 
• Alpine Loop 
• You Rock, Victoria! 
• Rene's B-day Totem Pole Multi

I've slowed down a lot in my hobbies. I hardly geocached and I really didn't go out of my way to find new food carts. In fact more than once I looked around different cart pods and ended up just getting fast food someplace else. One of my hobbies I really picked up was my collecting of coins and tokens. I purchased a good number of Presidential Campaign medals from 1828 to 2016. I probably became a little obsessed. I even ended up traveling to Anaheim to attend the biggest coin show I could find to look for big ticket items. I won third place for my display at the Portland Coin Show. We'll see what 2017 brings. Thank you to everyone who hid the caches found this year, and I hope to see you all out on the trail.

One last cache

Its been a long year. Not much geocaching for me. I just haven't been interested. Maybe I'll try to do some hiking this next year and grab a few better caches.

It's been a tradition since 2003 to find a cache on Christmas. This year it was cold, but dry and I choose a nice cache in Fish Hatchery Park were I have a couple of caches hidden. There are quite a few geocaches on the trail beyond this that I haven't found. But for the day just this one find

3 tree

Alaska--- the conclusion

Day 4 Glacier Bay:

The reason we picked this particular cruise was that it was the only one for Carnival going to Glacier Bay. Other cruises would go to Tracy Fjord which I'm sure is nice. Glacier Bay just happens to have more glaciers and is a national park so we figured if this could be our only visit we might as well see it.

It was nice and sunny (glacier melting weather.) Had a great time watching for whales and looking at the glaciers. Whale watching was probably one of the things I enjoyed most about the trip. If I had it to do again I might have tried to book a whale watching excursion from one of the ports.

Day 5 Ketchikan:

Ketchikan seemed to be the most familiar of the stops to me. Sure it was the same tourist trap shops, but they also had a shuttle to Wal-Mart and the convenience store sections had a lot more normal stuff (I'll be it very expensive.) I guess it made me feel I like I was on the edge of civilization again.

My mom and sister took the shuttle to Wal-Mart so while they did I took the time to find a multi cache.

Rene's B-day Totem Pole Multi

This one took you to several totem poles. I would have preferred a cache each, but I took what I could get. Took a walk down to Creek Street which was the old Red Light district. Found this cache

Fish-On

Once the family was back we walked around a little more. Took a tour of Dolly's Brothel.

Then we said goodbye to Alaska as we boarded the ship.

Day 6 Victoria:

After most of a day at see we arrived in Victoria rather late in the day. We took one of the buses downtown and too picture and looked for caches till it was dark

Whats Cooking?
Sunken Garden
You Rock, Victoria!

We didn't have very long. Got back to the ship and we were back in Seattle in the morning. We just got up and got moving.

The End

Alaska... continued

I left off at...

Day 3 Skagway:

Skagway was our port with the longest stay. We decided to rent a car and drive into Canada. The ship was in port when we woke up and after a bit of breakfast we made our way off the ship. We picked up the rental car and started our trip.

Just after crossing the border we took some picture at the crossing and then I found this cache

International Falls & Border - Alaska/BC

It was my first cache in Canada, yet we hadn't yet stopped at the border crossing.

We continued up the road stopping at the Yukon Suspension Bridge and these two caches

Just South of 60 - South Klondike Highway

Lean on Me

We got to our destination of Carcros where we had lunch and I found one more cache

Tutshi Memorial

We continued up to Emerald Lake and just as we went to turn around we spotted a bear at the side of the road. We took a few pictures of him. Even got out of the car at what seemed like a safe distance. Didn't really notice he was a grizzley until examining the pictures later.

The trip back was fairly uneventful. We looked around at the old grave yard and a lot of the shops. Back at the ship I found one more virtual

Skagway cliffs

To be concluded...

Alaska

Its been a couple of months, but I felt I should come back and finish my posting on Alaska.

I'd never been on a cruise before so I tried to pick up all the advice I could. All I can say is that you should go how you'd like to go. We got this cruise for my Mom's 70th birthday because we've talked about Alaska so much.

I booked Carnival despite a lot of warnings not to. Warnings from people that had never cruised with them. Carnival has kind of a reputation for being the cheap party cruise line. The first part is true, Carnival was by far the cheapest, we got a balcony for about the price of an obstructed sea view on other cruise lines. As for the partying and wild children there was little to none as this was a late May cruise to Alaska.

Now one thing about Carnival I will say is I was not impressed with the food. Maybe other cruise lines are better because I'm always hearing about the food. Carnival's buffets were OK, but certainly not great. And they weren't open long. The dining room was much better. I'd probably stick to that exclusively if not for formal night and such. I have no desire to dress up on vacation.

Started the trip in Seattle. It was an interesting day of getting on the ship. It is a big undertaking to get the ship loaded and ready for a week

Day 1: A fun day at sea. I can't think of much I did. Eat, look at the ocean, wonder around the ship

Day 2 Juneau: We got into Juneau a bit late and then had to tender off the ship. This was our first cruise and first port so it was a bit confusing. Once we were off the ship we went right to the Mount Roberts Tramway. This took us up the mountain were we looked for our first cache

Alpine Loop

We ran into some other geocachers and had a good search before finding it well hidden.

Back in town we didn't really have time to go to the Mendenhall Glacier like we wanted to. Instead we looked around at shops, the Capital Building (under renovation) and found one more cache

Museum Trading Post

 

 

 

 

 

To be continued...

sogeo.org is gone

I decided last month not to renew sogeo.org and the hosting company finally deleted it. It was one of the last local geocaching sites.

Portland
Central Oregon
Corvallis
Eugene
Southern Oregon

All once represented by their own websites and all are now gone.

www.georegon.com does still exist. I'm not sure when it started, but it was after all of these.

I decided to keep the domain name and just have it point to this blog. As for this blog I decided to change the name back and maybe even post a little. I'll be in Alaska and Canada later this month and should have some adventures to share.