Today we're in Glacier Bay National Park. It's very pretty. This is the first installment of pictures - there are more. This is the scene on the deck - people are out looking at glaciers, and the nice people from the ship are providing hot chocolate and booze (hope nobody goes over a railing into the 38-degree water!). The lady who's running this cart wanted to get a picture, so she asked another crewmember to take her picture. One of the passengers figured that they were a couple, and offered to take a picture of them together. She was *very* amused.



This is the bay, up near the Johns Hopkins glacier. The water is full of ice floes, but no really serious icebergs (although the park ranger called these icebergs nevertheless). If you look near the center of this shot, you can see two seals sunning themselves on an ice floe. It's really warm today - I'm sure this is the moral equivalent of a beach party. The area below the Johns Hopkins glacier is apparently the birthing grounds for the seals.



This is the Johns Hopkins glacier:



Sun-dappled snowfield above the Johns Hopkins glacier:



Looking back the way we came from the glacier:



One of the crew members spotted a seal off the ship. It surfaced several times around this ice floe, as far as I can tell mugging for our cameras.



The seal finally stopped playing coy and chased after the boat a bit:



I saw a seal toward the back of the boat playing. I don't know what it was doing, but it looked like it was just playing in the eddies. I guess cruise ships come in here every day, so the seals must be quite accustomed to their passage.

This is just an ice floe I thought had a particularly nice-looking underside. All fiddly, like one of Slartibartfast's fjords.