We spent two days floating among glaciers

• Main Entry: gla·cier
• Pronunciation: \ˈglā-shər also -zhər, especially British ˈgla-sē-ər or ˈglā-sē-\
• Function: noun
• Etymology: French, from Middle French dialect (Franco-Provençal), from glace ice, from Latin glacies; akin to Latin gelu frost — more at cold
• Date: 1744

: a large body of ice moving slowly down a slope or valley or spreading outward on a land surface

From Wikipedia:

A glacier is a perennial mass of ice which moves over land. A glacier forms in locations where the mass accumulation of snow and ice exceeds ablation over many years. The word glacier comes from French via the Vulgar Latin glacia, and ultimately from Latin glacies meaning ice.^[1]

Glacier ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth, and is second only to oceans as the largest reservoir of total water. Glaciers cover vast areas of the polar regions and are found in mountain ranges of every continent except Australia. In the tropics glaciers are restricted to the highest mountains. The processes and landforms caused by glaciers and related to them are referred to as glacial. The process of glacier growth and establishment is called glaciation. Glaciers are indicators of climate and are important to world water resources and sea level variation.

The distinctive blue tint of glacial ice is often wrongly attributed to Rayleigh scattering due to bubbles in the ice. The blue color is actually created for the same reason that water is blue, that is, its slight absorption of red light due to an overtone of the infrared OH stretching mode of the water molecule.<sup>[7]

One day we cruised through Glacier Bay National Park - check it out here
and the next day we visited College Fjord Alaska check it out here.</sup>
College Fjord is named after renowned East Coast colleges.
The bottom four pictures are of the Mendenhall glacier (no it's not named after Bronco as Rick thought...) which is located just outside Juneau. All of these glaciers are MAGNIFICENT!!!
(Although we couldn't stop thinking about Jack and Rose, poor kids.)

We explored the ship including three ports of call

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We had many great chats with one another

Rick and I are chatters. We love to visit with each other. However, because of our work, schedules with church and household chores, we don't often just get to sit and chat. We often start talking when we go to bed at night and then we finally get to sleep very late after a visit. Going on this cruise was especially great because we got to visit...for hours...for days. It was heaven. We covered a lot of territory as we usually do. We love to talk about all sorts of stuff and one topic that kept coming up was our past history together. You know, stuff like how we met and fell in love. How we were as poor as church mice for many years. How we worked our tails off to make our own way (yes, walking uphill both ways.) We love to reminisce about our early beginnings and we even started naming one thing that happened each year since we got married. Wow, that can take hours and we didn't get all the way through to the current time. We've had some great times over these last 30 years. We've struggled in some ways, we've gone through every emotion imaginable and we've been though some hard experiences, but we've persevered. We counted our blessings and thanked the Lord for his bounteous goodness to us over the years.
Without a doubt the best product of these past 30 years (besides just having each other) is being the parents to our four amazing children. I don't often brag about them, but each one is an amazing person who has accomplished much in their short lives. The are good people doing good things and they make us very proud. They're very smart, ambitious, good, funny, caring people who get what life is all about. They have married some wonderful spouses and we are so proud of them as couples, making their way in the world. And it just keeps on going. Two grandchildren already with two more on the way. There aren't words to express how much we love our children and their spouses. I think they are starting to get an idea as they get children of their own and experience first hand that overpowering emotion of loving ones own children.
The circle of life...ha, there is something magical (almost Lion Kingish) to it!

We met some new people

Rick and I tried unsuccessfully to get some of our family and friends to go on the cruise with us. Because of schedules, cost and other challenges, it just didn't work out for anyone else to join us. We've been on one other cruise by ourselves, and the other three have been with friends or family members. It is really fun to go with other people, but we also knew we would have a fun time by ourselves, and we were right.
The evening meals are served at the same table with the same group of people. We were interested to see who we would be dining with for the week. To our great delight, we ended up being assigned to dine with four single women. Sandra and June were friends from Ft. Lauderdale FL and they were both widows who recently lost their husbands. Sandra was originally from West Virginia and June was born and raised in New York city. They are both deacons in the Presbyterian church and they are delightful women. We also met Edith and Linda, who were friends from Los Angeles. Edith is Argentine and has lived in the states for many years. Linda was from Taiwan but she has lived in LA for many years as well. We were all mothers and grandmothers, so we had that commonality. Since we have visited West Virginia and Argentina, we had that in common with two of the women. We talked for hours about their lives, their families and their religions. We were able to tell about our family, religion and the area where we live. They were very gracious and wonderful to talk to Rick about his work and his interests as well. He felt like a king surrounded by all these accomplished women. All of them have visited Utah and have had some contact with our church. It was delightful to share our evening meals with them and to learn more about life in their sphere of influence. We enjoyed meeting back at the table in the evening and telling each other what activities we had done during the day. We were able to give them each a pass-along-card with our church information and our email address at the conclusion of our time together and to invite them to Utah as our guests sometime in the future. We hope they take us up on the offer.
Coincidentally, we also ran into a couple who live in our own neighborhood. We don't know them very well, but we had a nice time chatting with them over lunch one day. Since Rick wore his BYU stuff almost constantly, several other people on the ship and on shore said hello to us as fellow Utahns. We had some good opportunities to mix and chat with other people while on our shore expeditions, and it was wonderful to met and greet new people from all over the world.

We were entertained

If you've been on a cruise before, you know that the ship provides a variety of entertainment. Every day a copy of the schedule of upcoming events and activities is slid under the cabin door. Here is an example of the activities for one day. There is something for everyone. Gambling and drinking are a part of any cruise for those who want to participate, but it is easy to route around those activities if desired. Princess cruises also offered a series called Scholarship at Sea. It included classes in pottery, ceramics, navigation, photography, art history, culinary, fruit and vegetable carving, ice carving, galley tour, ballroom dancing classes, line dancing class, backstage tours and more. We enjoyed participating in several of these activities.
Mini golf, shuffleboard, basketball and ping pong were also available. They also show movies on a big screen in one of the theaters and they show movies on TVs in each cabin a well throughout the cruise. We enjoyed relaxing and watching a movie or two as well as several old "Love Boat" TV episodes from years ago.
The evening entertainment was wonderful. We found the Comedy Show to be very entertaining, funny and clean in language and innuendo. The evening production shows were well done and entertaining, again with out anything offensive. The production shows almost reminded me of watching a Young Ambassadors performance that included song and dance along with many costume and scenery changes. They did a splendid job entertaining us.
The cruise director was a young man named Peter*Tredgett from England. Besides enjoying listening to his delightful accent, he was well suited for his role and did a great job seeing that everyone was entertained on board.
Although this doesn't necessarily fit under the title of "entertainment" we also attended an Interdenominational Order of Service last Sunday since we were on the ship and had no ability to attend our own services. Cruise director Peter lead the services and he did a wonderful job. We were given a printed copy of hymns and prayers and we participated in singing "Amazing Grace" and "How Great Thou Art." Peter asked a member of the group to stand and read 1 Corinthians 13 on charity. He also read the following message about the Good Life. I thought it was good enough to share here with my readers (click on any of the above pictures to enlarge for reading.) He gave us all something to think about.
Another thing I really enjoyed about the meeting was that at the beginning, Peter invited everyone to stand and greet their neighbor. I'm always inspired by how gracious and kind people are in situations like this. We were all from different backgrounds and religions, yet I believe that most believed in God and Jesus Christ. There were about 35-40 people in attendance and we looked for commonalities rather than differences and we shook hands and said hello to some fellow Christians. Whenever we would introduce ourselves and say that we were from Utah, people would assume that we were Mormons. We had some opportunities to share a little more about our religion.