Our first visitors! Grandma Carol & Grandpa Russ!

Grandma Carol and Grandpa Russ came for what we hope will be one of their many visits to Juneau. While we spent much of our time on "we just moved here, can you help with this?" type house projects and trying to stay dry from all the rain, we did manage to squeeze in time to show them some of the beauties of our new city.  

Like this - a freshwater creek with spawning salmon fighting their way upstream with the Mendenhall River and icebergs that just recently broke off the glacier floating by in the background.

Climbing what the glacier has left behind.

We took them on a hike out to Nugget Falls.  

The picture above does a good job demonstrating the sheer magnitude of Nugget Falls.  But what it doesn't show, you can see in the picture below.  They are all freezing!  Freshly thawed glacial water, and recently fallen rain make for cold, cold water!  While the spot they picked makes for a beautiful photo op, the minute they got out there they were all screaming.  And so when I gave the thumbs up that I got the picture, they ran!  You can tell by Grandma Carol's face just how cold she is.

It's official, she's a Floridian.  You can take Grandma Carol out of Florida, but you can't take the Florida out of Grandma Carol.  After her cold mist experience, she wandered off and we found her here, sunbathing on a rock.

It was too good of a spot and she was soon joined by two little ones who also wanted to soak up the rays, and make Grandma Carol laugh.

But it didn't take them long to hop back into the water and do some more exploring.

And because they are Addy and Cora, we couldn't complete our visit without a trip to the Visitor's Center, full of exhibits.  Here they are touching 200 year old ice (as the exhibit explains, it takes about 200 years for the snow that falls on the glacial ice field to be transformed into part of the glacier and make its way down to the face.

We didn't even have to say goodbye, fully, yet.  Grandma and Grandpa left Juneau for Anchorage to join up on a tour of Alaska and take a cruise through the Inside Passage, stopping, of course, in the port of Juneau!  So we'll see them again, albeit just for a day, in about 10 days. 

Just another Friday night in Juneau...with the bears!

Just another Friday night in Juneau...with the bears!

There's this spot near the glacier, a pretty viewing area with some fenced in paths along a stream.  It's where we've seen sockeye salmon swimming upstream and spawning.  The area is plastered with signs about high levels of bear activity.  The first time we visited I was quite nervous.  The times we've been back, the area is so full of tourists from the cruise ships that I figure there's no way any bears are coming near this place.

Well, some friends we've made, who also have kids our girls' ages, were telling us that dusk is the time the bears really come out.  And that because the area does have a lot of people, the bears are used to people observing them.  As long as you use all your "bear common sense," it's a great place to see them.

So Friday night the rain stopped.  If for no other reason than as an excuse to get us all out of the house for some much needed fresh air, Grandma Sherry, the girls and I got into the car and went to Steep Creek.  I knew there was a chance of seeing a bear but figured it was remote.  Turns out, wasn't so remote.

Just out having a little late night salmon dinner.  As you can see, the bear is walking through and down the stream.  That's how I figured we'd see a bear.  From a comfortable distance, as the bear did his thing, ate his salmon.  Funny thing was, as we were walking out that night, I had noticed another part of a sign on the trail that talked about what to do in the event a bear appeared under one of the trail platforms.  Again, being naive, thought this was in the rare instance you happened to be walking and come across a bear that is underneath one of the bridges.

Nope.  Wrong again.  Bears come right up to the bridges.

That's the bear, munching on his catch.  Right underneath us.  That's Addy's rain boot and Cora's tennis shoe in the picture.  We can hear the crunching of bones and smell the actually not-so-pleasant aroma of freshly "filleted" spawning salmon.  

Every once in a while the bear would just look up at the people, which including us had amassed to a crowd of about 20, as if we were the spectacle.  Everyone's nervously chatting in hushed tones.  Loud enough so the bear still knows we're here, as all the signs instruct us to do, but not so loud that we risk scaring him away.

And then, just as quickly as he came, he was done.  Off to another spot.  Which happened to be in the direction of the parking lot, so we gave him a nice big headstart.

The Salmon Hatchery

Ask Cora where she wants to go at any given moment and you'll get one of three answers: the glacier, Hot Bites (an outdoor restaurant with good milkshakes and fries), or the salmon hatchery.  The Macaulay Salmon Hatchery has become a favorite destination for us.  Not only to check on the status of the spawning salmon but for the cool touch tanks with aquatic creatures the girls thoroughly enjoy.

Now, see if you are as impressed with my newly minted knowledge of the salmon life cycle as I am.

Here is the "ladder."  The salmon swim up the Gastineau Channel and encounter the fresh water of the hatchery.  They make their way up the ladder, against the current, jumping at times from stage to stage.  Once they reach the top, the eggs and milt are extracted and the fertilization begins.  It's very romantic ;)

Once the baby salmon have hatched, the particular "smell" of this fresh water is imprinted on them before they are released into the ocean, just as the smell of a certain stream or river would imprinted on a salmon born in the wild.  That smell is what the adult salmon search for when they are ready to spawn in 4-5 years time and when they will make their back to this hatchery.  The hatchery releases 120 million salmon each spring but only 10% actually make it back.

Even at just 10%, this is an insane number of salmon to see in one spot on one random day.

After the eggs and milt are extracted from the salmon, they die, just as they do in the wild.  The salmon are sent away to be turned into fertilizer and other products. (Did you know that you don't actually want to eat spawning salmon...I mean it makes sense but I guess I never thought about it.  Spawning salmon are all but dead by the time they make it upstream.  The minute they hit freshwater, their bodies shut down every system and function non-essential to reproduction.  By the time they lay their eggs, they are sometimes even beginning to decompose).

Cora loves to admire the beautiful salmon eggs.

The hatchery was careful to explain that this is not a fish farm, which is illegal in Alaska.  The hatchery is there to support the survival of wild salmon.  It protects the eggs, releases the baby salmon into the ocean and is there to receive the spawning salmon at the end of their life cycle.

Enough about salmon.  The hatchery also has some great aquariums and touch tanks for educational purposes.  The girls love them.  Addy touches everything except the crabs.  Cora won't touch anything but loves to stand there and watch.

Kisses from Daddy

So the blog has been quiet for a while...

That's in the large part for two reasons.

One, the Lanz ladies are taking on the new Alaskan frontier on their own for a while.  On July 27, Graham left to take the bar exam in Columbus, Ohio, and then make his way to Rhode Island for Naval Justice School where he will be for the next ten weeks.  75 days until his return.  I couldn't believe it when I counted up the days.  I feel like I've been managing emotions and challenges pretty well throughout the move, but I'm not going to lie, dropping him off at the airport was tough.  I couldn't ask for a better partner in life than Graham. He's my rock, and a constant source of love and adventure for the girls.  And don't even get me started on how Star's been coping, as she hoards his shoes and slippers all over the house.  But we're all just taking it day by day.

Speaking of day by day, I was trying to think of ways to help the girls understand how long Daddy was going to be away - to know when he was coming home.  I read on a military blog about making a paper chain, one link for each day.  So I sat down one night, construction paper and glue stick in hand, and made a chain.  Once I was done, I really thought about whether or not to show it to the girls.  Do you have any idea how long a paper chain with 75 links is?  It is depressingly long!  But we did give it to them and they really enjoy ripping a link off it each morning.  I wrote the number of days until Daddy's home on each link so we can keep count of the days, and we get excited when we notice the chain getting noticeably shorter.

The girls also get a kiss from Daddy each day.  Thanks again to another military blog, we have a glass jar about 10" high and 8" in diameter filled with Hershey kisses.  150 to be exact (75 for each girl).  It's a special treat, and another way we can see the amount of time until his return getting smaller.

Our "kiss" jar & you can see the paper chain in the background, wrapped around the curtain rod above the window.

The second reason is all our stuff got here!  It made it.  With only minimal damage.  While living off only what we brought in our suitcases from the airplane trip and a few things we purchased once we got here was tough, it was not near as hard as I thought it was going to be.  In fact, having all of our worldly possessions show up in one day in about a thousand boxes was pretty overwhelming.  Here's what our kitchen looked like when the movers left on delivery day:

Not exactly a functional kitchen at the moment.

Did we really need all this stuff?  To me, the answer was no.  I was fairly happy with our minimalist lifestyle.   Don't get me wrong, I am very happy to have my microwave, toaster and my "go to" pots and pans for cooking.  And the girls were ecstatic to have more of their toys.  But as I unpack box after box, I see our things in a different way.  There are things that we treasure, like our vast library of books and my grandmother's antique hutch & china.  We don't need them, but they have a value beyond their utility.  But do we really need 10 plastic cups, or 5 sets of placemats I'm not even sure how we accumulated?  Being forced to go through everything that gets tucked in drawers and corners of closets when you move I guess has its benefits.

And, Graham, if you're reading this, don't worry, I'm saving some boxes to unpack for you :)