#POTW x 5: Alaska, New York & Everywhere in Between

Nothing like starting a new weekly column dependent on photography, then buying a new camera and computer and taking off on a whirlwind month of travel, often with limited WiFi. Needless to say, I’ve fallen behind on my Pic of the Week postings, but I still have some cool pictures and travel stories to share with you all, so without further adieu, here’s five weeks (five weeks!) of my favorite pictures.

Week of September 22 – Visit Florida Shoot at Robert Fontaine Gallery, Miami

 

I was thrilled when my friend, fellow writer and Visit Florida Entertainment & Luxury Insider Kara Franker invited me to join her for her latest video shoot. It was all about Miami’s unique and exciting Wynwood Arts District and we featured Wynwood Kitchen & Bar, Wynwood Walls and the Robert Fontaine Gallery (owned by my dear friend Robert Fontaine). It was awesome to see Kara in action and be a part of the shoot. Video coming soon!

Week of September 15 – Yankee Stadium, New York City

 

I was in New York last week for strategy meetings with my team at The Points Guy. It’s easy to turn a work trip into pleasure in New York, and it happened to be one of the last home games of the season at Yankee Stadium. It’s been a top priority to get to a game before Derek Jeter retired. I became a Yankees fan when I taught school in the Bronx. And I became a Derek Jeter fan when I ran into him at a Starbucks on the Upper East Side and he turned out to be the nicest guy ever (and so handsome in person!). Coincidentally, our paths crossed again in South Beach a couple of years later, and along with a few friends, we had drinks together at the W South Beach, so, you know, we’re friends.

I make a point of catching a game whenever I’m in New York during baseball season. And when the Yankees went to the World Series in 2009, I bought tickets to Game 6 and was there to see them win their 27th title. That’s a moment I’ll never forget.

Last week’s game was special too. I went with my best friend Ted and his boyfriend Matt (Ted was also my date to the World Series). The stadium’s energy was surprisingly calm, but Jeter got a standing O at every at bat. It was sad to think that we won’t see him at short stop anymore. He played a solid game and went two for four. Baseball won’t be the same without him.

Week of September 8 – Denali National Park, Alaska

 

At the start of the month, my family met in Alaska for a seven-night cruise through the Inside Passage aboard the Celebrity Cruises Millennium. At the end of the trip, we stayed an extra night in Talkeetna near Denali National Park to see Mount McKinley up close. It’s the third most prominent mountain in the world at 20,073′. We opted for a “flight-seeing” tour aboard a cherry red single prop plane with skis on its landing gear, enabling it to actually land on glaciers.

Talk about a feast for the eyes. We took off and flew over fields with amazing meandering rivers. The fall colors were starting to show and enormous mountains were covered in lush green and also red and yellow. It looked like something Matisse could’ve painted. We flew over glaciers and ice fields and golden rocky peeks rising through the fog.

Unfortunately, that fog set in during our flight, making landing on the glacier too dangerous, so we didn’t get to actually walk on a glacier, but the views were truly out of this world. On the way back, our pilot spotted a couple of male moose wading through a river. Alaska’s beauty is overwhelming. It was hard to pick my favorite picture from the flight, but I love the texture of the snow on the peek in this one and the glimpse of the plane’s red wing.

Week of September 1 – Hubbard Glacier at Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska

 

We were treated to so many amazing glacier sightings on this trip. We took an airboat ride around the Taku tidal glacier near Juneau. We spotted hanging glaciers along mountain ranges as we cruised the Inside Passage and we saw amazing fields of ice in Denali National Park. The Hubbard Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park was unreal. This is where an Alaskan cruise comes in handy because you can really only view this glacier from the water. It rises 350′ above the water and there’s another 150′ below.

Our ship approached it at 6:30 a.m. as we sailed from Juneau to Seward. We made our way to one of the observation decks to marvel at it up close. There was a lot of glacier cleavage that morning and the sound of the ice cracking from the face of the glacier and falling into the water was amazing. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Even as we sailed away, I headed to the aft deck to watch it disappear on the horizon.

Week of August 25 – George Inlet, Ketchikan, Alaska

 

Our first port of call on the cruise was Ketchikan. We arrived on what we learned was a typical rainy morning, as Ketchikan is considered the “rainfall capital” of Alaska. It’s surrounded by the Tongass National Forest, which is actually a temperate rainforest. We headed to George Inlet, a wooden lodge on a dock to feast on fresh caught dungeness crab.

We sat in a private dining room with a fire as the rain fell steadily over the water. The setting was cozy perfection and the crab was so fresh, cold and delicious. We learned how to properly crack all of the joints and get to the most succulent parts of the meat. We washed it down with an Alaskan Amber beer and cheesecake covered in blueberries for dessert. Yum! To cap it all off, we took a seaplane ride to view the beauty of Tongass.