The times I’ve been caught talking to myself I was saying things like “Bryan, you won’t be doing any of that boring personal life blogging will you?“, to which I would answer: “No, of course not“. Please note, I’ve denounced drinking on more than one occasion/morning, and we all know that wagon skipped town long before I got a chance to hop on (“You’ll get hop-on’s“). So, let me just get the relapse out of the way: I vacationed in Alaska/the Yukon and it was a hoot. Let me tell you about it.

Let’s talk a little about our group (we were in a tour group, just like the original Alaskan explorers!). First off, we had the venerable Scott, the twenty something law student leading the charge. With the single exception of some lovely young ladies from Chattanooga, mostly everyone in the tour was old and boring. No offense to old and/or boring people, of course. Who am I kidding, you don’t use the internet anyways.

Though we did stop at every expansive view, where we would all topple out of the bus, the majority of our time was spent riding a bus. I won’t elaborate.

Because lists are easily digested, let’s just list the things we did by the order of coolness:

1. Plane ride over glaciers. This was just good ol’ fashioned awesome. You really have no idea what you are dealing with when it comes to the great white north until you see it from the sky. Really. Just look.
2. Kyle’s first three (legal?) beers. They seem to grow up so fast! Especially when you cross a border where the drinking age is lower…
3. White water rafting in the Nenana river. This was very cool too. I’m man enough to admit I was the only white water virgin on the raft that day. Good thing the Tennessee family went with my little brother and I, otherwise we’d had been the only two in the raft.
4. Old junk at the gold dredge. I’m a sucker for rustic like junk artifacts (read: not trash). I just love taking photos of old equipment because it’s so freaking cool. It is also easy to do and makes me feel like a big-boy photographer.
5. Panning for gold. Though I didn’t find much, my little brother found a little. So did my parents. About $30′s worth combined.

You can check out our entire Helmig Family Flickr photostream for the photos, we’ll be adding them regularly. Not sure if any of the tour members will ever run across this, but if you do, drop a comment and say hi!