Hubbard Glacier

Tuesday - September 9, 2014

It’s a sea day.  I lurve sea days.  Sea days are made for sleeping in, chilling out on the balcony (well...except when there are glaciers outside and you're freezing your ass off), and eating your (my) fool head off.  I’m not big on cruise ship activities.  I don’t go to karaoke, I don’t go to the trivia games and I don’t participate in the belly flop contests.  What I do do is eat like there’s no tomorrow, go to the comedy shows, watch dueling pianos, the ocean, catch up on reading, nap like a toddler, and watch tv shows and movies I’ve downloaded but haven’t watched.  

We sailed towards Yakukat Bay and headed towards Hubbard Glacier as that was the big activity scheduled for the day.  I was excited about Hubbard because it’s big, it’s (hopefully) accessible, it’s one that calves a lot, and it’s one I haven’t seen before!  We went to Sawyer Glacier last time and also saw Mendenhall in Juneau - I wanted to do Glacier Bay, but the scheduling for a Glacier Bay cruise didn’t work out (sob!).  But Hubbard is supposed to be pretty awesome, so I was eager to see it - especially since I youtubed a bunch of videos of it calving. I think uh, that may have elevated my expectations to unreasonable heights. Yeah...don't be watching videos of glaciers calving before you go - only the most awesome instances make it online. What you're likely to see in real life is probably a bit more underwhelming. Not to say it's not awesome, because it is - but you're probably not going to see an avalanche.

As part of our suite perks we get to have breakfast in La Cucina.  I know in other ships it’s Cagneys, but I love La Cucina.  It’s on the 5th floor (though we wandered around lost on the 11th floor, then 12th floor, then on the mysteriously jacked up 5th floor) and the view is phenomenal.  I like that each table gets a great ocean view, but the booth is honestly a little tight for four people.  We fit, but had to juggle the plates a little.  There’s a cold buffet with cereals, oatmeal, fruit, yogurt and assorted pastries.  I think there was smoked fish and cheese too.  We ordered the fruits de mer (basically an eggs benedict with lobster sauce - though there were pieces of lobster and scallops in it...soooo good) and the crab cakes bendict.  We each swapped a piece so we all had a crab cake benedict and a lobster benedict.  Good stuff.  And dude, the coffee was so much better than the coffee in the dining room and buffet - it was french press.  And it was delicious.  I liked the food - it was really good.  But I really like the environment.  It was quiet, serene, calm.  It was the antithesis of breakfast at the buffet - which, let’s face it, is a zoo.  And the Sun does NOT have a good buffet - it’s too small and the flow sucks donkey balls.  So breakfast in La Cucina is a nice break and a nice way to start the day.

super tasty French press coffee

as you can tell, we are not morning people

chocolate croissant.  It was fine.  How can anything with carbs and chocolate be bad?  But it wasn't super yummy and not something I'm likely to grab again

crab cake benedict

fruits de mer

what we each ended up with.  Super deliciousness!

After breakfast my parents went to hang out with our family friends while my brother and I walked around the ship.  Then I kicked around in the cabin being a lazy slug (and hit up the buffet for a quick late lunch) until 2 pm, when we entered Yakukat Bay.  Our butler brought us snacks (yay!) - a plate of different cookies as well as mini sandwiches and chips along with chocolate covered strawberries.  Our friends brought a plate of cakes, cookies and brownies from the buffet and we brewed coffee in our teeny tiny coffeemaker.  The one thing that sucks about penthouses on the Sun?  No fancy coffeemaker - the others all have those fancy thousand dollar machines we’d never buy in real life where you press a button and coffee, cappuccinos, lattes and other delicious goodness comes out magically.  Courtesy of our butler.  We had one of those fancy machines on Pride of America and my dad fell in love and wanted one. Until he priced it and realized it was over a grand. Then that dream died. But a teeny tiny coffeemaker is better than none, so we brewed 3 pots of coffee (4 cups?  Really?  More like 2.  Maybe)  and continued stuffing our faces like it’s going out of style. Also - they give us 2 mugs in our room. We have 4 wineglasses, 4 champagne glasses, and 4 tall juice glasses. Even 4 glasses in the bathroom to brush our teeth with. But yet, only 2 coffee mugs. Hmm.... So we DIY'd - we went to the buffet and grabbed 2 mugs so we'd have 4 - one for each of us. But every time they cleaned our room they kept taking the 2 mugs away. So we ghetto styled it. We'd wash the mugs in the sink and hide it in the TV cabinet so we'd always have 4 mugs. Yeah...we're classy like that.

We make it to Hubbard around 4 pm - it was freezing cold because duh, we’re standing across the water from what’s essentially a big ass block of ice.  As we approach the glacier we pass by a flock of sea lions yelling their heads off.  Being that none of us had seen any wildlife yet, this was exciting and we all turned our cameras towards them (not just my people, but those in adjacent cabins and those below.  Yes, we can all see each other’s heads when we lean over) and you could hear the clicking of cameras.  Because it’s freezing, we bundle up and take a gazillion photos.  

When it gets too cold, we head inside for a break to warm up - but we have the TV on so we can hear the announcements (or whatever.  Someone was giving facts about the glacier on TV) with the balcony door open a bit so we could hear.  

see how they're not all bundled up.  Yeah...that's going to change - because it was cold!

now they're all bundled up.  When it's cold, you don't care if you look cute - you just want to make sure your extremities don't fall off!

super blurry photo of us in our afternoon snacking glory

We snapped photos.  Lots and lots of photos.  And we saw the glacier calve!  The sound...like thunder.  But...snappier.  Snappy thunder???  Whenever we’d hear it, we’d start scanning the face of the glacier for calving.  There was not massive avalanche like calving, but we saw some significant chunks fall into the ocean - big enough to create waves that rocked our ship which we totally felt because we were on the front of the ship.  We could see the waves swell and sweep towards us and then we’d rock.  

the dirty glacier next door

Here's Hubbard:

Here's some crappy photos showing Hubbard calving.  Hopefully you can see it, though watching it in real time was freaking awesome.  It's much less impressive when captured on film (by me, not anyone else). 

Did you see it?  Sort of?  It wasn't the biggest one we saw, but I think it was the clearest one captured on film, as subtle as it looks, all white on white.  

I'm going to do something new and exciting: the gif.  I hope this works:

Edited to add: I made a super ghetto "video" stitching together about 160 photos - which is basically just a slightly longer gif.  :)  

Then I was fascinated by the trails of ice created by the calving.

I really think we got super lucky - we saw the glacier as we approached, and though the captain spun the ship around 360 degrees so everyone could see it - I really do think we saw it the longest and I felt we were the closest to it.  We got closer than I thought we would!

leaving Hubbard (sob!)

We didn’t know if it was formal night...well, NCL doesn’t do formal nights anymore.  The last time we did NCL they did a dress up or not night - where one of the restaurants would be a formal night venue and the other a casual venue.  Now there’s a “NCL’s night out” or something like that.  I had no idea when it would be, but I’d heard that it would be the first sea day of the trip...which would be our Hubbard day, so I told my peeps that I thought it was that night.  We sort of half assed dressed up - no jackets for the guys, just a collared shirt and tie and I threw on a sundress.  

Before we went to dinner my parents wanted to go and watch the Pure Variety show - where they sing and dance to various tunes.  We walked in about 20 minutes late and watched most of it.  It was okay.  The singers and dancers were good - but it was incredibly cheesy.  I don’t know if they thought it would appeal to the demographic of people who cruised Alaska, but eh.  They worked hard.  They had good voices.  But the little skits and “battles” made me cringe just a little big.  

After the show (we went to the 7:15) we went to Seven Seas, the nicer of the restaurants (well, nicer as in more formal) and while I got the night wrong, the people there were dressed nicer so we didn’t feel out of place.  

I had the cream of broccoli soup as a starter (eh.  Not good or bad) along with a Thai chicken and shrimp in coconut curry sauce dish.   I asked the server if he liked it and he said, “you’ll like it.  Asians tend to like it”  Um...okay.  I guess so.  It was good, and since the server was Filippino, I guess he’d know and wasn’t talking out of his ass.  But I enjoyed it, I guess that’s what matters. 

the eggroll, which is mysteriously exactly the same as the spring roll

my brother got the salmon.  He said it was okay

my Thai curry dish.  Quite tasty!

my dad go the lamb shank, he said it was good, not great

 We skipped dessert and went to the buffet for ice cream and cake instead.  Because we’re lazy, and we’re gluttonous and there are less witnesses paying attention to our fat ass tendencies of having multiple desserts in the buffet since no one is serving us.  Hehehe.

And we get out first towel animal:

The evening is capped off by a rewatching of Godzilla, which come on, is pretty awesome.  Who doesn’t want to see a giant lizard rise out of the ocean like an ugly ass Aphrodite and engage in a fight to the death battle with two even uglier overgrown cockroaches?  Awesome!