Thursday, August 28, 2014

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. 

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