Bab's Babes - A wonderful gift part 1

Heads up - this post is not craft related. There may be several on the same topic.

I'll explain the nickname later on in the story, but for now will start from the beginning.

I've been a part of a book group for the last 12+ years. It's been around longer than that, but that's how long I've been a part of it. People have come and gone over the years, but there has been a core group of us that have stuck together almost every Wednesday night for all that time. Barbara started about the same time I did. She had retired from banking and was working at a law firm. She was wonderful, funny, told great stories and was very generous. She loved us and we her.

 As you can probably tell by the "was", she passed away rather unexpectedly last August. Even more unexpectedly she left provision for all 6 of us to go on vacation together. She always gave me a hard time about not having a passport telling me I never knew when I would need it. I have one now.

When we sat down to decide where to go it seemed a pretty easy choice, Alaska was the destination. We began our journey right after we got out of school for the summer and spent 12 days traveling together. We took tons of pictures and had some great experiences. I am going to chronicle a few of them here so we can look back and remember. It's mostly for the special group of women I went with, but please enjoy the pictures and stories and go with us if you want.

Our first flight was to Toronto. That was crazy. We had to get off the plane, run through the airport (almost literally - we had very little time), get our luggage, check it back in, go through customs and get back on the SAME PLANE! There are no pictures of this part as there was no time. We were all pretty irritated at that point. The rest of the trip to Vancouver was uneventful. 

View from hotel straight out

We landed and took a crazy cab ride downtown to our hotel. There were a couple of times I was afraid we wouldn't make it. Our cab driver was filling out forms as he was driving down the road. They have these weird lanes that are closed to parking after a certain time and change to driving lanes. NOT everyone had moved and there were some close calls. It was unnerving to say the least.

The view to the left

My roomie - D and I left the hotel at 10 p.m. to find something to eat. We found a cool hot dog stand on a corner not too far from the hotel and ate a hot dog. They tasted really good. My son requested Canadian money as one of his souvenirs, which I got in change from the vendor.It was 1 a.m. our time so we should have been exhausted but we were too excited to sleep. We watched some of the kids coming out to party and walked around a bit.

The next morning we found a place called Scoozis for breakfast. It was definitely a different experience. Some of the things we ate were great, some weren't what we expected. Overall it was a fun experience. The other part of my son's trip request was that I go to a Tim Horton's which was accomplished that morning. I got coffee even though we had just finished breakfast. 

D and I decided to walk to the pier instead of waiting for the transport. I'm glad we did since we had a chance to experience some more of the city and got some cool pictures.

Hotel

bike lane

YWCA

Flowers by pier

Pier

If you've ever been on a cruise you know the boarding process can be lengthy and a tad annoying. This was no different. At least there were cookies ;-)

Ship - home for 7 days

We set sail a bit later than planned due to them having to load a back-up generator onto the ship. We had the lovely emergency drill and got to meet some of the people who had cabins in our area of the ship.

Inward passage

This was taken later in the evening. This was about how dark it got at night. It was very strange that it didn't get totally dark most of the time we were awake. 

lots of logs in the water

More to come...