This morning, Michelle left the homestead at 5:30 a.m. to get to her office before 7:00 a.m. to help her crew greet the season’s first cruise ships.
Two “small” boats from the UnCruise line started the cruise ship facet of our tourist season today. The Alaska tour industry is off and running for another summer.
Two UnCruise ships in front of Haines (Photo: Barbara Blood).
I’d hoped to see them pass the homestead this morning, but I may have still been asleep when they slipped up the fjord. Luckily, our friend Barb took some good photos, and agreed to let us post them here.
Last year, Aly participated in the season as part of our local museum’s staff. This year, she’s a kayak and river rafting guide, working with Michelle at Rainbow Glacier Adventures. She’s been up and out early all week, running the river and hiking a local trail as part of her training. She’s wonderfully happy, excited about the season, swapping stories with her fellow guides, accumulating gear. The trainings she attended in California recently boosted her confidence and whet her appetite. If I can, I’ll try to get her to write about that here in the coming weeks.
Rainbow Glacier Adventures buses lined up to carry tourists on their adventures (Photo: Barbara Blood).
That is, if the job doesn’t completely take over her life. My role in all this is to return to chief cook and bottle washer, adding homemaking to my homestead chores. I’ve been making most of the evening meals and washing most of the dishes throughout the year, as the office manages to keep Michelle busy all year, but now it kicks into high gear, with later homecomings, more consistent work, more exhaustion when they get here.
The trick will be for them to find the right work/home balance. Aly wants to continue working on setting up her cottage; Michelle has her projects here at home. And, crucially, we need to keep the garden well tended.
More importantly to this blog, we lost the use of the booster that gives us better phone and Internet communication. The company has sent a replacement. The question is, will it arrive before the big ships do, and the summer degrading of our connectivity begins? (See The Mysteries of Cellular Internet Explained.) We’ll see. I assume it will, and we’ll be in the best possible shape before the big ships arrive.
It’ll all come together. Starting now.