We're not in Schengen anymore.

Monday, June 29, 2015

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We didn’t set an alarm and it turns out we didn’t need to. Clay was up very early and went back to bed. I woke up next and it was 7:05am. Perfect!

We took our time and got dressed and packed up for the flight. We both thought we were being careful. I left all my gels and liquids in my purse! It did not cause any problems at the airport, so it was fine. Clay thought his tablet was gone. Then he found he had packed it. But as he searched and re-searched the room, he never noticed that he had left his plug adapter in the wall socket. He didn’t realize it was gone until we unpacked at the Spitsbergen Hotel.

We went down to a very busy buffet breakfast today. We filled up since we knew we were flying between noon and 2pm and would either miss lunch or have to buy something somewhere. We had a taxi to the airport included in our Kensington Tours package and he showed up as we waited in the lobby shortly before 10am. It was only a 5 to 10 minute ride to the airport. He went into one of the many tunnels we had seen or seen on the map. The tunnel had intersections and turns and even a roundabout. I wasn’t expecting all that!

We went to the self-check in kiosk and got new boarding passes and luggage tags for our checked bags. We carried them over to the bag drop and she asked for our passports. That was a first here. In all our travels since we left Marina in Stockholm no one else ever asked to see our passports! We were amazed that we could fly out of Stockholm without anyone ever checking that we were who the tickets were issued to. She took our bags and we set off for security.

There was a short line at security and it was very slow moving. We still didn’t need 2 hours! We got through security without any issues and went to look for gate 20. It was downstairs and Clay is gun shy about going to the gate in Europe as in some places like England you can only spend a few minutes there after they call for your flight to board. In others, like France, you can get there but you can’t go back to shops or restaurants or bathrooms. So, we sat down for a while. We used the restrooms, you know, just in case. We went and bought a blt for Clay and a yogurt for me for our lunch onboard. Finally, we went downstairs. It was completely empty down there, but nothing to keep you from going back upstairs. It was gates 16-29 or something. All the gates were open and empty except gate 20. Our gate 20 was closed off with a passport control booth. We were mystified because Svalbard is an island of Norway. Anyway, we sat outside because it was pretty clear that there was no backtracking from inside there and probably no restroom. We saw some people (most!) turned away and some quickly sent through the buzzed open door and others took longer. Eventually, we got up and went to the passport control entry to gate 20. Since both agents were available, we split up and each took one. Mine spoke first. When and where did you enter Europe? I couldn’t tell her. Clay couldn’t tell her. We both knew it was in May and in Ireland. They both found entry stamps from Belfast and Dublin. When did we enter Schengen? No idea. We’ve heard of it, but couldn’t tell you which countries are in or out of it. We told them we had come to Europe on a cruise ship and our first stops in Europe where in Ireland. Neither Ireland is in Schengen. OK. We told them we got off the cruise ship in Stockholm and flew to Oslo and we’d been in Norway for the last almost 2 weeks. They were exchanging looks and talking about us. Finally, the woman stamped my passport and returned it with a stern warning. It is your responsibility to obtain a Schengen stamp. How am I going to do that? If no one was anywhere I traveled stamping passports, then how am I going to get a stamp. Clay asked if we were leaving Norway. The answer was no that we were leaving Schengen and that to leave Schengen you had to have been permitted to enter and have a stamp. Well here we are and no one stamped us in, so what do we do now? They stamped us as leaving with the warning and sent us on. Someone somewhere in Stockholm dropped the ball as far as we can tell. Since everyone who got off the Marina in Stockholm was leaving Schengen from there eventually that was where we should have been stamped in in order to depart. Clay later studied the Internet and the itinerary and blamed Belgium as the first Schengen country that admitted us. Anyway. We carried on like a couple of International criminals. We had already discussed how lax they were about ID and travel here!

 The flight was called for boarding early and shortly after we got into the gate area. There did not appear to be a plane there though. We got up and followed the others. Our boarding passes were scanned and we walked out on to the tarmac. There was a SAS jet parked about 6 gates away and attached to a jetway from the upstairs gates. There was an elevator from the tarmac or the stairs. We followed everyone up the stairs and really hoped we were getting on the right plane! The plane was soon nearly full and they shut the door. The announcements were being made but not in English, just like inside the airport. Finally we heard the pilot say in English that we were going to Spitsbergen, Svalbard. Thank God! All we needed was to have boarded the wrong plane because of lax Schengen rules!

The flight was uneventful and a bit under 2 hours. We ate our snacks and drank our water. SAS only serves complimentary hot tea and coffee. We haven’t tried to order a cup of tap water. They sell bottled water along with sodas, so we just fill my travel bottle in the airport after security. We walked across the tarmac on arrival and through the small airport to baggage claim. There was a woman there with a Nordstjernen sign. I asked her about the bus. She told me that she wasn’t here for me. I asked her where I find the bus to Spitsbergen Hotel. She told me to go out to the bus I could see and give the driver my Hurtigruten voucher. I didn’t get a voucher. She told me then you don’t get a ride. I told her my invoice said I paid for transfers. She asked to see it. I got it out and showed her. She said to just show the driver that. I understand this is a new itinerary for Hurtigruten but this is the 3^rd departure of the season, so you’d think they’d all be a little more familiar by now. We were not the first passengers on the bus that the driver said was going to Spitsbergen Hotel that showed him the final itinerary email printout. He was expecting to collect vouchers and had an argument with a couple 2 seats in front of us about being able to keep their itinerary. He didn’t. He didn’t try to keep ours. The ride into town was much more industrial looking than I expected. Evidently, coal mining was the last boom time here. When we checked in to the hotel, Clay asked if Hurtigruten had left a packet or any information for us. NO. We are supposed to have breakfast and a tour tomorrow morning but don’t know when or where. There was a line behind us so we just went to our room 106.

We learned that the whole indoor/outdoor shoes had already begun. They should have had a less subtle sign at the door or a greeter for the airport bus of new arrivals. We had read about the indoor shoes/outdoor shoes onboard the Nordstjernen which was complicated by the last minute request for waterproof boots and the inter-Europe small luggage allowances. Anyway. We managed to bring waterproof boots, outdoor shoes and indoor shoes for each of us and remain within our luggage allowances.

We waited for a while for the bus load to clear out and went back upstairs to reception to find out more. The woman there showed us an email she had printed out because she wasn’t sure what it was. It was for our cruise itinerary. Monday departures and our date was the 3^rd departure. I don’t know when she had gotten the email. We asked about meals. Dinner tonight is not included. The map at the desk isn’t clear that the road from the top of the hill at the hotel down to town is a polar bear-free zone. She didn’t answer that but told us we could easily walk it. That isn’t the same as should walk it, but Clay said we’d go. She also offered to make us reservations for dinner. We had read in the room that it was a 7-course French meal restaurant. No way! She tried to show us the menu that you only had to order any 3 courses. NO. I had been around the corner and found a copy of the bar menu and had seen small meals and sandwiches. I told Clay that and she agreed we could do that without a reservation. She volunteered that we could help ourselves to complimentary waffles from 4 to 6pm. In the meantime, we had to go into town to buy Clay a new outlet adapter. We had a map and a store name, Coop. We had been going to these grocery stores and calling them Co-op. Now we know. This was more of a general store. Clay wanted to get a t-shirt with 78 degrees North on it anyway. He had seen one with Svalbard, a polar bear and 78 degrees N onboard Marina. When we got down to the store, he found the exact t-shirt, but not in his size. He found a different one but in his size that he could live with and the plug adapter and $30 or so later we were on our way back uphill.

We had a waffle each to save room for a bar menu dinner later. I am typing this during the time between. We will go to dinner soon. Sandwiches started at about 120NOK and a steak was 166NOK or so. I will assume it will be fine and uneventful.

According to the information we received from the email printout at the front desk, tomorrow breakfast starts at 7am and we have to be checked out by 8:30am and luggage loaded on the bus for 9am departure. We get a 3 hour bus tour that ends at the pier. Check in MS Nordstjernen. 12:30pm is lunch on board. Sail away is 1pm. Cabins will not be ready until after 4pm. We should have an Expedition Team welcome and information given after all passengers have had a safety briefing.  

Spitsbergen Hotel is a converted historic building. It was once the headquarters of a coal-mining company. It is locally called the Funken which is a shortened form of the Norwegian word for something like functionary building. It dates from the 1940s I think which doesn't sound right, since they have up b&w photos in the halls of the local Nazi invasion and occupation during WW2. Clay points out that it was probably built after the war was over and the Nazis were gone.

Clay also says I should say that we may or may not have reliable Internet or any Internet onboard Nordstjernen. We may not be able to publish posts here for a while. He also says that he couldn't get photos uploaded from Nordkapp sailing along the coast so he has no plans to upload photos from this ship up here. I will still be typing up notes each day and if I can I will publish them and he will add photos when he gets to it. We should be back here at Spitsbergen Hotel on Friday. We'll get back to Stockholm on July 4 and between then and July 7 we will definitely get caught up.

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Tromso, Day 2

Sunday, June 28, 2015

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We decided to sleep in today. Wisely as it turned out because it rained all day! We had a filling complimentary hot breakfast at the Clarion Collection With during the last hour of service at the buffet. We were in no hurry because of the rain but also because we had museums in our sights today and the earliest opening was 10am. We walked past a Hapag-Lloyd cruise ship, Europa, docked near where Hurtigruten docks. We walked down to the 34 bus stop to see what time it was running today as we couldn’t figure it out from the website. It turned out that it was only at 10 past the hour on Sunday. We had just missed it and didn’t want to wait an hour or wander. I pulled out the Tromso map and showed Clay the Polaria was with 250 yards past the Mack brewery pub that we walked to last night. He agreed to just walk. We would like to get our money’s worth from those 24 hour bus passes. We already have with the roundtrip yesterday, but still. The Polaria is an aquarium that focuses on Svalbard. Since we are flying there tomorrow, we were ready for it. At 11am, shortly after we arrived they had a bearded seal training/feeding session so we went straight there and managed to hold onto our spots at the railing. There were 2 really big seals and 2 smaller ones. They worked in matched teams. At noon they showed a panoramic film on Svalbard and at 12:30pm they showed a panoramic film on the Northern Lights. We hustled out and up the hill to the bus stop to try to catch the 34 bus for a ride around most of Tromso island. We just missed it again! We walked back into to town to look for a minibank (ATM). Clay spent the last of our cash on Polaria tickets (205NOK – 120 for me and 85 for Clay). One wouldn’t take a card without a chip. We’ve heard about this but in all these years of travel it’s the first time it’s happened to us. We went back to the one he used yesterday and it was out of service. The third time was the charm.) We walked on across town to the Polar Museum of Tromso. They had loads of artifacts from expeditions and archaeologic explorations. It was a good companion piece to the Fram Museum in Oslo. We found at least 2 Roald Amundson statues today. We paid 90NOK to get in Polar Museum (60 for me and 30 for Clay). We walked back towards the hotel and as we passed the first of the bus stops, I pointed out to Clay that this was the last possible opportunity we had at 2:50pm to go catch bus 34 and circle the town of Tromso by public bus. It was raining, so I think we both figured once we got inside, we’d be there until we meet the cab to the airport. Clay we agreed so we hustled up again and got there with time to spare. The bad news was that this time the bus shelter was full and we had to stand out in the rain until the bus came. When it came only about half the people boarded. It was a mostly full bus but we got good seats by the back door. They are up a step so you can see out well. It was a scenic ride. The map showed route 34 ending out by the airport, but I had seen a different route map in the bus shelter this morning that ended at the University. The route did end at the University and they made everyone get out there. It was fine, though we had decided to ride 34 back. So, we got out and checked the time table when Clay looked across the street and saw bus 20 over there. It was headed to Sentrum so we crossed the street and got on. We didn’t get good seats at first but by a couple of stops later we had the good seats by the back door again. It was about 30 minutes or a bit more to circle back to the center of town. We could see a Hurtigruten ship had docked and there were about 100 people scurrying through the town’s street with and without luggage as the bus came down the hill. We got off bus 20 near the cathedral to go in a shop I had seen from the bus outbound. They had some cool t-shirts, but with packing space tight, Clay said he is holding out for one from Spitsbergen or Svalbard. Good call! We walked on back to the With. It was about 3:30pm and you know what that means. Complimentary waffles! We had 2 each with hot chocolate. We were chilled and wet. It hit the spot as a sweet hot late lunch. The blackboard did not yet have written on it what is for dinner. We’ll be surprised. I won’t be disappointed no matter what because I am so full of waffles that I don’t even need any supper. No worries. Dinner was meatballs in gravy. They were kind of like small meatloaves instead of balls. Served with potatoes and vegetables. Soup was tomato. Caramel pudding for dessert.

I checked weather for Longyearbyen tomorrow and is should be partly to mostly cloudy and in the low 40sF and will feel like the mid-30sF. Ouch! I have threatened to pack my waterproof/windproof pants in my carryon in case I want to put them on between the airport and the hotel. Clay scoffed. He also made a decision not to pack his lightweight silky high-tech fabric long underwear. I cannot understand it. He brought a thick heavy pair of wool socks that won’t fit inside any pair of shoes he has with him or the ones he just bought but he left behind underclothes that would have taken up less space! He is rethinking that decision now.


The Hurtigruten ship, Finnmarken that was here today from 2:30pm to 6:30pm left right on time. It sailed out under the Tromso bridge. Finnmarken was evidently a newer and larger version of the ship we were on, Nordkapp. It was shaped a little differently. It looked like it had a nicer aft restaurant. It also looked like the top deck of cabins had balconies! That would have made a huge difference.

Norwegians say hey. They spell it HEI! When you meet one in a shop or something, they'll greet you by saying it twice in a kind of high voice. Really, both men and women in a higher pitched voice than the regular speaking voice. Some some hey hey and others say hi hi. Once in a while someone will mix them together. Hei! Hei!

Good night. I’ll hope for Internet access in Svalbard! Till then…

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Tromso

Saturday, June 27, 2015

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Day 2 with no shipboard Internet on Nordkapp. No announcement has been made but this morning I heard others complaining about it and how long it might be out. We are off at 2:30pm or so, I guess that is how long it will be out for us. Until then, no published blog posts or photos. I’m still writing and Clay is still photographing.

I am sure I haven’t talked about it, but it became clear right away that Norwegians eat whale meat. I think I first saw it on a menu in Oslo. I saw it for sale in the fish market in Bergen. It was on the hotel buffet in Bergen. Clay claims he never noticed it. Today on Nordkapp we watched a film about historic Tromso and it was followed by a discussion and justification for whale hunting, and meat consumption. Minke whales were specifically mentioned. I have no idea what kind of whale meat I have been seeing offered but if the Norwegian tour director says Norwegians hunt and eat minke I have to believe it. We have still seen absolutely no sea life except birds. Last night and this morning we passed a cluster of small jumping fish and birds feeding on them but again that was mostly birds. This morning at 4:15am a whale watching excursion left Nordkapp. I don’t know at what port they have or will rejoin us, but we figured wherever they are watching whales, we should be able to spot some too. So far, no joy.

Clay got off alone at an early stop, Harstad. I was in the shower. We both got off briefly in Finnsnes. Sadly, an ambulance came to the dock while we were there and 2 EMTs went inside Nordkapp. They left with an elderly woman. She looked like she had been in bed and not like she had been up and injured. They took her and her husband off empty-handed with just the clothes on their backs. No coats, and she was in her nightgown and bare feet! I know when she feels better she is going to be upset about her purse and her shoes if nothing else. We wish them the best. I am guessing she was just severely dehydrated and IV fluids and some water will make her better. What kind of business denies customers water?!

We checked out of our room about 10 of noon by removing our luggage to the luggage room on deck 3 by reception.

We had our final meal at lunch. Originally that last lunch after our noon checkout deadline was not included. The guy that took Clay’s credit card to take our payment for the meals told Clay he needed to buy 2 dinners and 3 lunches so he did. Those meals were adequate but not worth the $43 or so per person per meal that Hurtigruten was charging and then the 25NOK for water.

We found a new place to sit inside on deck 4 forward of the elevator and stairs. It is a lounge between the tour desk and the conference rooms. There is also a small quiet library there! We hadn’t seen this area before! There were big windows and you could see out both sides (though not the front). We had been through here the first night for the information meeting but it was so jam packed to get in the conference room that we didn’t see anything. We went back to the conference room this morning to watch a film about the history of Tromso and found this great space. Tromso and Bodo actually are spelled with o’s with slashes through them. The slashed o is pronounced kind of like er and it means island. Who knew?

After lunch, this is where we sat. It was better than Panorama Lounge as several people came in and commented. As we sat there, the tour director came on the loudspeaker and told us we were in a strong current with a name. Sorry don’t know what it was. The other thing he told us was that in a few moments on the starboard side we would pass an island that was serving as a research facility for musk animals. I assume he meant musk ox. Clay stayed put with our stuff since there was a lot of traffic through there and I walked to the other side and found a window by the hallway. As soon as I got to the window we started to pass the island, but at the first point of land was a flat grassy area with 3 large brown hairy lumps lying down. I assumed they were 3 muskox. The tour director came up beside me and nudged me over asking where are the musk animals. They were almost out of sight but I pointed them out and told him what I saw. His eyes got big and he couldn’t believe it. He told me he had been making this announcement for years and then running over to this window to look but he thought they’d be standing around grazing or chewing like cows and he never looked low on the grass. I replied that cattle lie down all the time. He guessed so but was still amazed that it was the first sighting he’d had. Of course, next time they probably won’t be laying there!

We got off our usual 15 minutes late. We walked off pretty quickly in the mob and right at the end of the gangway was our taxi driver with our name on a sign. Speaking of gangways… Kudos to Hurtigruten on the automatic gangways! They are the bomb! A single person can operate them remotely and they just open and unfold in moments all on their own. I cannot comprehend why every ship running who has to get passengers ashore isn’t using this technology!

The driver took our bags and walked us about 15 steps to his taxi. He drove us about 3 minutes to the Clarion Collection With. When we arrived there were people from Nordkapp that had been waiting to get off with us that were walking along the waterfront in front of the hotel. We went that way later and you could see Nordkapp maybe 100 feet down the wharf. There was another Clarion Collection hotel between Nordkapp and the With. We think someone screwed up when they did not order transportation in Bergen and instead ordered it here. It was a smooth level and short walk even with luggage. The taxi was ridiculous.

We checked right in and our room 516 was ready. We were offered waffles at 3 to 6pm! We each had one. We were offered a complimentary dinner from 6 to 9pm. It was equivalent and very similar to the dinners we’ve been having on Nordkapp. They also had a bucket of ice cubes with a water dispenser and 2 pitchers of fruit-infused iced waters. Amazing! The hotel is conveniently located. We have no view and there are probably some rooms with spectacular views so that is a little disappointing but it is a big comfortable room with basically 3 meals and TV and internet and endless ice and cold water so we both feel like we died and went to heaven. We’re happy to have the 2-night break here.

We set off after waffles. It was clear and the sun was mostly out after a couple of cloudy and rainy days so we decided to get out and see somethings. We got money, bought 24-hour bus passes and headed out after checking our plan with the front desk gal. She had suggestions and we followed them. We went to the Narvesen store and bought our 90NOK pp bus passes then walked back downhill to the bus 26 stop to wait. The bus came only twice an hour so that was a bit problematic since we just missed it as we were rounding the corner from buying the passes. Bus 26 left downtown at 10 past and 40 past during most of the day and hourly at night. So, we left and walked through the market square and past the city hall and library and down to the waterfront to see the Arctic Cathedral from across the fjord. We got back a few minutes before the next bus. Per the desk girl’s advice we took the bus all the way to the furthest point on its loop route to the Fjellheisen Cable Car. We walked up and had the misfortune of bad timing. There were 2 tour buses already there and as we were buying our tickets (150NOK pp) another group passed us and got in line as their guide got behind us to pay for their tickets. We had to wait for about 30 minutes to get up and back down again. As we were leaving the cars were running empty or nearly so. If we had been 30 minutes later, we’d have had a much more pleasant experience. There were 3 cruise ships in Tromso today, plus Nordkapp for 4 hours. It is a university town and large by the region’s standards at 70K but still 4 ships of passengers was noticeable. Per the hotel girl’s advice, we walked down hill to the Arctic Cathedral. She said there were signs to direct us, but that wasn’t true. Clay used his phone’s GPS and it was further than the phone said but it was all downhill and we had just missed the bus again so rather than sit and wait a half hour we walked in that time. Arctic Cathedral charges 40NOK pp for entry and has no brochures about the building. It was making noises in the breeze as we walked around it from uphill to enter the front. No idea why because they weren’t informative and had no literature to offer. It was an interesting and stark building. We walked to the closest bus stop we had seen an inbound bus stop at as we were walking downhill. It was the bus 28 stop and it ran at 01 past and 31 past. We had about 7 minutes to wait for the 01 past bus. We got back to the hotel in time to hear the Nordkapp blowing her 5 minutes to departure horn and then her departure toots. I told Clay I would have been afraid to do what we had done in the 4 hours Nordkapp had scheduled, but clearly it was doable as we had checked into a hotel and eaten waffles and killed 30 minutes wandering town first. So, I guess that is something good to know.

Clay has been drinking Mack beer onboard Nordkapp. It is brewed here in Tromso, or was. There tagline is the world’s northernmost brewery and it was until they moved it south of here and another brewery opened in Greenland. They have kept the tagline even so. They still have a pub at the old brewery facility and they offer tours. Clay had known he wanted to go and we checked after getting back and sure enough they were closed on Sunday. That meant that after our complimentary chicken buffet dinner that we walked about 20 minutes away to get Clay a $15 beer! So after all of our bitching about the high prices on Hurtigruten he was paying 74NOK for a 0.4 liter beer onboard and at the brewery’s pub he paid 155NOK for 0.5 of a different beer. It was a lot better, but he says none of it was worth what he paid for it. It was extravagant. The t-shirt was a deal!

It is past our bedtime again, though it is not after midnight tonight!

We have our sights on a bunch of museums tomorrow.

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Bodo, Svolvaer and the Trollfjord

Friday, June 26, 2015

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Something new last night. Or at least we never noticed it before so I assume it is new. There was live music entertainment in the bar on deck 7. It was a guitarist/folk singer and a harmonica player early on, then later I only heard the guitar and singing. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear either. The bad news is that it is directly above our cabin and since they are miked and amplified they can be heard for quite some distance from the bar, like clearly in our cabin. I guess it is really lucky that we napped and planned to try to stay up late to see Torghatten. While we waited up the clouds lowered and it got foggier. It is not clear what we’ll be able to see. But, at about 10:55pm, we passed on the port side, Norway’s royal yacht heading southbound and exchanged a honked greeting at speed. It was pretty cool. I checked with the binoculars and the royal boat did not have any identifying marks on her. Strange.

We were both up and out expecting to see the mountain with a hole in it, but it was not to be. The cloud cover was too low and heavy and it was not visible. I spoke with the tour director before he made the announcement and asked him which side it would have been on if visible. He replied both, that the ship would turn and it would be visible from both sides. Clay and I discussed it and can only figure out that if it had been visible that the ship would have turned in a pivot in place so all could see it because we never made a “turn” that would have made a land feature visible from both sides of the ship. So actually we still don’t know where Torghatten appears on the mainland or on an island. So, we were up past midnight for no good reason.

This morning we were slow starting. That was unfortunate because we were both still abed at 7am when the tour director announced that we would cross the Arctic Circle at 66°33′ in about 10 minutes and there was a big globe marker on the port side to mark it. Clay hustled up and got dressed and out to take photos. I stayed in the cabin with Bob and binoculars. I think I must have had a better view than Clay because he didn’t notice the big steel cables holding it in place or the birds, which I assume were arctic terns. Now, I’ve looked them up, we’ve been seeing arctic terns for days. Maybe those birds I saw on the island at the marker weren’t that special. The other thing we both noticed was the big pile of rocks. We assume people must have imported them and brought them ashore to place them there because it didn’t look like there could have been that many loose native rocks available.

We had a late breakfast and it seemed less crowded. We won’t stop at a port with time to go ashore until afternoon in Bodo. Right now at 9:15am to 9:30am we are at Ornes. Clay put on his coat and went out for photos but didn’t try to set foot on land. At 10am they announced a crossing ceremony on deck 7 out back. They had last night sold 99NOK coupons for champagne out there at 7:30am this morning. I guess that must not have been well attended, but I saw plenty of champagne glasses at breakfast after 8am, so maybe there was some attendance. We will probably try for the 10am just to see, but it will depend on how much crowd we can take between then and now. We have spent the morning in the 2^nd row of seats in Panorama Lounge. I like the full 180 forward view and the Internet access. But the people can be beyond comprehension. I told Clay he needs to focus on the views and not the atmosphere or leave when he can’t because he hasn’t seen anything truly outrageous up here yet.

Clay left to go sit outside on deck 6 aft shortly after I typed the above. We met up on deck 7 aft for the crossing ceremony with King Neptune. They were really cruel about it. The winning entry for the guessing the crossing time contest was off by only 6 seconds. The official Arctic Circle crossing time was 7:09:33am. She guessed 7:09:29; her birthdate! They poured an entire 1 cup ladle of ice water down the back of her shirt. It was windy and cold out too! I think the high today is predicted to be 10C. As Clay pointed out, that big bin of ice water was the only we’ll see onboard Nordkapp and they are pouring it down people’s backs for free. But, you can’t get an ice cube or ice water otherwise for good money! They were also offering a shot of cloudberry wine if you took the cup of ice water down the back. We left. If we want to try cloudberry wine, we’ll buy it somewhere.

I went down with our passports to see if they were doing Arctic Circle stamps. They told me to try back at 11am. Clay took them down after it was announced. We spent most of the morning otherwise sitting in the Panorama Lounge since it is indoors and has the best forward views.

At 11:30am we lined up with the rest for the open seating lunch buffet in the dining room on deck 4 aft. There was spaghetti with meat sauce, roast pork in gravy and catfish cakes. The soup was tomato noodle. Ice cream was a pretty bad rum raisin. I had chocolate swirl cheesecake. As far as I can tell Clay is living on bread, butter, cheese and lunch meats for both breakfast and lunch. He eats a lot of potato salad and pickles with these handmade sandwiches. He mostly has fish for dinner. I went back and brushed my teeth again and got dressed to go out. We are docked in Bodo from 12:30pm to 3pm. It is gray and overcast but not raining and 4C.

We walked into Sentrum Bodo and uphill to the Nordland Museum. Bodo is the capital of Nordland. It is the 3^rd largest Northern Norway city at about 50K. Entry to the museum was 60NOK pp. The signage was sadly all in Norwegian. I did pick up an English language brochure and can tell you that we saw a dry aquarium, a display on the Lofoten fisheries, and a display of Arctic birds found nearby, a Sami exhibit. The highlight was the silver treasure. Over 1000 years ago, some Vikings hid or lost a 1.2 kilo hoard of silver coins and jewelry in a scree field. In 1919, someone found it and it is in the museum. The key piece was a big brooch used by males to hold a cloak. The coins were Anglo-Saxon and Arabic. Isn’t that amazing? It was an interesting little museum. There is also an air force museum here. Bodo was bombed by the Nazis in WWII and was a NATO airbase during the Cold War. As Clay says it was not very photogenic, but then it was rebuilt after WWII. We walked back through a shopping mall and I visited a Norway textile products shop, but we didn’t buy anything. Now that we have those boots we are already in a luggage red zone!

We get off Nordkapp tomorrow. It hasn’t been bad, but it has been pretty far from good. I can’t imagine doing this on the 15-day back to back Bergen roundtrip as Hurtigruten recommends and markets. I would certainly rethink buying meals in favor of grocery stops or their onboard café for a la carte. Again, the food has ranged from bad (not at correct temperatures) to just good. Nothing stands out as excellent for the prices certainly. Then there is the whole begging to be sold an overpriced bottle of water problem! Honestly! We are actually looking forward to 2 nights in a hotel in Tromso and now a little leery of the older, smaller ship at Svalbard.

We have another stop at 7pm in Stamsund. It is only 30 minutes and seems to be to let an excursion unload for a Viking Feast experience on Lofoten Islands. We are staying onboard for dinner! The last stop of the day is Svolvaer at 9pm to 10pm. It is supposed to be the center of the Lofoten Islands. Two things within easy distance of the pier can be visited in the hour we’re ashore. An ice bar (there have been several since Oslo at least!) and the Lofoten Warmuseum. I hope we’ll be up and go ashore to one or the other. Clay is napping now so maybe if I can stay awake.

There is an opportunity, weather permitting and time too I suspect, of sailing through the beautiful and and narrow strait of Raftsundet into the Trollfjord at 11pm. They say they will serve real Norwegian “Trollsoup”. I will need to get on the Internet and check that out first. Still don’t know. I never did find an empty seat anywhere on deck 7 or deck 4 with a view. I sat on a window sill on deck 7 and could connect to the network but not reach the Google internet page. I sat in the Internet cubby on deck 4 and again got connected but was never able to load the Google page. Clay napped for over 2 hours. I did needlepoint and tried to take some photos of the passing scenery. It is too bad there was nowhere available to actually sit and enjoy the sailing. I guess this is the real downside of a small ferry. There are more passengers than there are seats.

It is nearly dinner time. We expect changes tonight. There were several loudspeaker announcements this afternoon for the Great Rail Journeys group or their leader. I saw them unload a tour bus to board Nordkapp this afternoon at Bodo. Strangely, because as we walked past the train station, we checked the arrivals and departures board and there were only about 3 places you could connect to on the train and one was Trondheim. Anyway, evidently there was a problem with their booking and dinners onboard too. Eventually they were told they could not have their scheduled 5pm dinner but would be seated at 6:30pm. I can’t imagine where because that is our dining time and not that many people left today to swap out for the busload that arrived in the Great Rail group. There will be an evening excursion tonight to Lofoten Island Viking Feast dinner so maybe that is where they plan to get the empty seats. Unless they relocate all of us though, it seems unlikely they’ll be able to eat together as a group. Well, we’ll see.

I have no idea what was going on in the dining room, but service was very slow. It was more than a half-hour before we got to as much as order water or other drinks. By the time they had served dessert they were running us out for the next seating. There was a little mixed salad, very well done roast beef with sauce and potatoes and veggies and a chocolate brownie kind of thing with berry sauce and cream on it. It was all Okay.

We are still discussing staying up to midnight again tonight. After the disappointment and stress of staying up last night for nothing. It seems to have cleared off now though and the sun is shining as bright as it has all day with blue skies visible. Fingers crossed we’ll have the special Trollfjord sailing and be able to stay awake for it.

We are docked in Svolvaer now. It is called the center of the Lofoten Islands. Earlier we passed a peak that the tour director announced was one of the highest peaks in Norway. Neither of us heard the height for sure nor the name. We even disagreed about which peak he was speaking. In any event, neither seemed as high as the peaks we went through, around and over between Oslo and Bergen. We were scheduled to be here for an hour. Like everywhere else though, we’ve arrived 5 to 15 minutes late and then try to leave on time. So, we had about 45 minutes here. We had thought about going to a Magic Ice bar at last, but when the time got shortened were reconsidering. Then when we passed the guy on the dock yelling and trolling for customers it put us off for good. We went out to the right and instead paid 80NOK pp to enter the Lofoten War Museum. It was disturbing. It was a huge collection of WWII ephemera and uniforms and an entire Gestapo office. The Lofoten Islands were raided and occupied by German/Austrian special forces on March 4, 1941. Given the amount of stuff in those few rooms, when they left they must have just run out empty-handed!

We have an hour or so to find out if we’re going to make the special sail into the Trollfjord. The weather seems pretty nice to us so we’ll hope so. I will go and try to find a seat and hope for an Internet signal so I can post this tonight. If anything else happens tonight, I’ll either come back and add it here or I’ll talk about it tomorrow. I’m back. Still no Internet connection. Panorama Lounge is still hell on earth. So, I’m back in the cabin with my dirty little window. Clay has lost his favorite spot on the back deck of 5 or 6 to smokers now as well. In other bad news, the live music is back in the bar on deck 7 tonight. It is very strange because it is not on the program and unlike everything else it has not merited an announcement either. Not that we would know. The latest thing is that people try to talk over the announcements that are not in their language which at some point means that no one can ever hear any announcements. So, we know the tour director made an announcement about the Trollfjord, but we aren’t sure what he said about it. Well, I guess time will tell. I don’t know when this will get posted. Remember that if we don’t post or reply for a few days, it may just mean we don’t have Internet not that anything bad has happened!

So, we both stayed up for the Trollfjord experience which our tour director described as the highlight of the cruise and it may have been. It was spectacular and especially at midnight! Norway wins at fjords! I mean other places have fjords but Norway has an embarrassment of fjords. When we left Svolvaer, we apparently made a pointless detour solely for showing off these fjords. We sailed the strait of Raftsundet and made a sharp left turn into Trollfjord. We went only a short distance in a more narrow fjord and when we reached the end, the ship turned in place a full turn and then again before heading back out and retracing our path in. They served “trollsoup” which was hot creamy vegetable fish soup. Clay said it was warming to drink the hot soup but I don’t know if he really liked it. They had a couple of young women dressed up as trolls and sold the souvenir mugs with the special drinks. It is hard to believe it is past midnight and still light. Like maybe 5pm in summer on a rainy, cloudy day. But still!

We need to get some sleep as tomorrow we pack up and move on to the next stage of our cruise marathon. Clay said today after his nap that he thought the 2 weeks we have at home before the Great Lakes cruise won’t be enough time to recover. Probably not.

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Trondheim

Thursday, June 25, 2015

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Breakfast this morning was a little different. I still started with berry yogurt with granola cruchies, but then I had a Norwegian pancake. It was similar to a Swedish pancake, but thicker and chewier. I had it with raspberry jam.

So, in all our emailing we have gotten notification that we should be bringing waterproof hiking boots to Spitsbergen for the next cruise. Our US Hurtigruten booking agent advised us to shop at any of the Norwegian coastal cities we would go ashore at and not wait for arrival in Spitsbergen. He also advised that Nordstjernen did not have boots to loan or rent as their main excursion ship Fram does. So, today we had a blustery, gray wet day in Trondheim and from about 9am to noon to be ashore. We did not have any plans here and it turned into a boot shopping morning. I found a pair of over the ankle rubber boats with a good tread and a supportive insole that fit with room for an extra pair of socks for 199NOK. That is about $20 to $25 so not cheap for boots that I plan to leave behind after using them, but nothing here is cheap and as Clay said it was cheaper to buy them here and leave them there than to have paid extra luggage to haul hiking boots we already owned from home. Finding a pair for Clay was a little harder and he wound up buying a very good pair of GoreTex hiking boots. We’ll have to see how he feels later about abandoning them. We don’t have any extra luggage space though! He paid 399NOK. We did also manage to see the Old Bridge, the old wharves and the outside of the Nidaros Cathedral. We also managed to find and walk through a street market. The Nidaros Cathedral is the world’s northernmost gothic cathedral. It was begun atop the tomb of St. Olav, the Viking king who brought Christianity to Norway. We sailed past Munkholmen, a rock island fortress, on our way in and out of Trondheim. It has been occupied since Viking times.

We sailed from Trondheim at a little after noon. We went to the restaurant and had our first meal without a meeting involved. Our new keycards binged us right in. They had beef stroganoff and rice or catfish plus the usual assortment of cold dishes. You have to buy a 1NOK labeled bottle of still water at lunch in order to have a drink of water. You have to pay 25NOK on your keycard for it and they still have a tip line for it. I have done this twice at lunch now and have not tipped. I think there should be limits and this crosses them. They have a self-service tap water dispenser by the juice dispensers by the coffee machine at breakfast, but at lunch they pull a metal screen over it and lock it so you have to buy drinks outside of coffee, tea and I think maybe milk. There is no excuse for it but greed.  For dessert, I found what looked like blintzes or blinis. I got 2. I was in for a surprise. Remember this morning’s pancakes? Well, put raspberry jam and whipped cream inside and instead of folding, roll them up. Voila, dessert.

I typed up these notes and posted yesterday’s while Clay napped. I just witnessed the Panorama Lounge during a featured historic lighthouse sailby. It was like a scene of hell by Bosch. I am not exaggerating by much! Clay had the camera in the cabin and it was on the port side so I hope he got up and took a photo. It was a nice dark red lighthouse. I had seen on the schedule that we were to sail by a beautiful lighthouse and an hour earlier I had turned my head and looked out our window and seen a beautiful little lighthouse on an island. I took photos of it, so we’ll see what gets posted!

Our first assigned seating, fixed menu dinner tonight was not bad. Our table companions were from WI. There was another table for 4 separated by about 2 inches and there sat a single woman from NYC and a couple from Portland, OR. They had plenty to talk about and other than introductions the 2 tables stayed separate. My special requests for no seafood/no fish had taken hold. There were 2 little tags of green and red on the table. Clay asked the people who wondered where we had been if they were for them and they had not seen them before. Clay moved the tags to my place and sure enough, I was delivered no seafood and then no fish. Lucky! I had a little hard toast with serrano ham and some greens and vinaigrette. The others had the same toast and greens with what Clay thought was a tuna salad on it. For dinner I had potatoes and potato salad with 2 pork cutlets wrapped around white cheese. I ate one and it was fine. Clay ate the other and his white fish. The others said the white fish was mild unto flavorless. Dessert was flan. Coffee and tea are self-served upstairs in the Panorama Lounge. Our dinner companions told us that they bought the coffee mug/coffee & tea package. I can’t tell you what it cost, but the tour director had worked out the math and informed us at the information meeting that you had to drink 12 cups of coffee outside of what is included with meals to break even unless you were just interested in having the mug to keep. It is our understanding that the mug was good for a year, so it might work out better if you really wanted coffee or tea 24/7 and were doing a lot of sailing. We were not clear whether the mug transferred between ships or was only good on one ship. Anyway, they bought it because they are on the northbound/southbound back to back and 2 weeks. She left dinner last night and went and got their mugs and took them to deck 7 and filled them and tried to bring them back to the dining table. Evidently it caused quite a commotion as they stopped her at the door and refused to let them bring the mugs into the restaurant. They were told it was not allowed to bring the mugs into any of their restaurants. They replied that was not told to them when they bought the mugs and the drink plan and it wasn’t written anywhere. They pointed out to us that now it is written at the door to the restaurant. How ridiculous! I cannot understand how they are failing to sell Internet minutes which has to be a huge profit center for most ships and this one is trying to increase profit by selling water or access to water at any rate. Who deprives people of water? Why don’t they charge extra for air? Internet profiteering would not be as offensive as water profiteering.

Going to publish this now. Trying to decide whether to try to stay up past midnight for the expected sail by of Torghatten. It is a mountain with a 160 meter long x 35 meter high x 20 meter wide hole through it! That would be something and I did have a nap as well as Clay did. But, still it seems all I want to do is sleep on here because it feels to me like the ship is always listing and that makes me want to lie down which makes me tired…

Tomorrow morning between 6 and 8 am we are to sail across the Arctic Circle! I have to confess that I don’t know what they call a person who has or not sailed across the Arctic Circle. Order of the Blue Nose. First shellbacks and now this.

Oops! Posting later because it seems we are going to dock for a little while at Rorvik. We went ashore for 20 minutes or so and bought Clay a Coke Zero and some candy at the Coop. They also had a Renni 1000 (I think that is at least close. It is the only other grocery store chain we’ve seen here.) Richard With, a southbound Hurtigruten came in while we were docked. Rorvik had a fish house on the dock which we haven’t seen a lot of. They also had some kind of fancy metal finned building. The building was  the NORVEG – a cultural centre and museum of coastal life. The new building by the architect Gudmundur Jonsson is situated directly by the water. Opened in 2004, its sail-form roof surfaces take up the theme of the maritime location and seafaring tradition.

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Geiranger with Trollstigen Pass

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

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Well, the bloom is well off my romance for Norway. Perhaps I paint with too broad a brush stroke and I should instead say that I CANNOT recommend Hurtigruten. We never expected a luxury experience. We have always used every ship we’ve ever sailed as transportation so we should not have been disappointed. But Nordkapp/Hurtigruten cannot decide whether they are running a cruise or a ferry and they are doing poorly at both. We have evidently completed our 3^rd or 4^th port call since we boarded. Two were while we slept supposedly, we don’t know. Two were this morning and we arrived late for both and left immediately. I know they boarded things, cars, people, but I am not sure anyone had a chance to see anything. We are leaving Alesund now. Clay set foot ashore. I gave it up. I feel seasick and heartsick that we are wasting our time and money with this part of the trip. Instead of the 45 minutes we were scheduled in Alesund, we had more like 20. The other thing is that the tour director warned that if you left the ship and did not get back on that you would be left. OK, fair enough. But, we had a morning stop in Alesund and then we sail onto Geiranger and tender the shore trip people like us, then the Nordkapp is scheduled to stop at Alesund again this afternoon/evening. They made numerous announcements with dire warnings about not going ashore because of the late arrival and not to miss the ship’s departure and make sure you are back onboard. But, why couldn’t people without an excursion get off this morning and spend the day in Alesund and reboard on the return stop of the ship? We’ll never know because we’re getting off in Geiranger and don’t rejoin Nordkapp until after dinner at Molte.

We had a quick buffet breakfast. They had a lot of fish again as well as brown cheese and cinnamon rolls. You can serve yourself tap water at breakfast. Tap water on Nordkapp is potable. You are only allowed to drink it in your cabin. At dinner, you have to buy a bottle of water. Unless you buy a bottle of wine, in which case, if you ask they will give you a bottle of water. Buying a beer doesn’t not get you water. They do not serve tap water at dinner and you may not bring your own into the restaurant. Forget about ice or a cold drink. Room temperature.

As far as scenic cruising, we are glad we did the parts we already did because we have not found a way to enjoy the views. There is not enough public viewing seating for everyone onboard. Some passengers don’t even have cabins, so demand is higher than normal as well. There is reasonable open deck space but it is too cold and/or too wet out to enjoy it. I am usually willing to own my part in disappointing experiences by blaming my expectations, but in this case I am not. I am putting a lot of blame on Hurtigruten for the design of the ship and the experience as well as their marketing and selling it as a cruise experience.

They say they charge $11 (I believe per person) to you cabin account per day for tips. There is no turn down service. You are reasonable for marking your own beds/cots up. This is not that big a deal as every bed we’ve had since leaving Marina has a duvet folded into a small rectangle in the center of one person’s sleep space and you have to shake it out and cover the bed and tuck the loose fabric at the foot of the bed. So, we have to pull the cots out flat and then do the same thing. If you put out a sign that is in the cabin, the attendants/stewards/stewardesses are supposed to make up the cabins between 8am or so and 2pm or so. We have been out all morning and ours hasn’t been made up. We’ll be gone all afternoon so we’ll see. But if we don’t ever have cabin service or meal service, I think they’ll need to rethink those tips!

The other thing is laundry. We needed to do laundry after a week on the road. I charged 30NOK to the account for a token for the washer (with soap) and a token for the dryer. We started the load at 7am and went to breakfast. The timer said the wash would take 30 minutes. It was over when we got back. We put the wet clothes in the dryer and put in the token and started it with it set to sense dry clothes and stop. It ran for 1.5 hours without stopping. Clay opened it and the clothes were still soaking wet. He tried but you cannot restart the dryer without putting in a new token. He went to reception and bought 2 new tokens. He split the load into another dryer and both machines ate his tokens without running. He didn’t close the doors first. An attendant arrived and he complained. She gave him 2 new tokens and restarted the dryers. Clay has gone to check again to see if the clothes are dry yet.

With all the hordes of people and the incessant multi-language announcements and in general just the crappy experience we are having, I am failing to look beyond it and find a way to appreciate the beauty of the setting. I believe Hurtigruten is blocking my enjoyment of Norway rather than facilitating it which for the money is what they should be doing.

Our cabin did wind up being serviced about 11:30am. The clothes did dry after another hour. We had a good excursion that was ruined by the handling of the 160 or so participants by the tour director. This excursion Geiranger and Trollstigen pass was 1595NOK. It was to leave at 13:25 which was our scheduled arrival time in Geiranger. Geiranger fjord is 16km long and is said to be one of the most beautiful in Norway. I am happy that we already sailed the Naeroy fjord of which the same is said because we did not see the Geiranger. Nordkapp sailed into the end of the fjord amid a Princess ship, Disney Magic and Le Boreal. Nordkapp stopped to allow a ferry to pull up alongside and empty arrivals and then load the tour people and the departing passengers. That would have been fine, but the tour director made a loudspeaker announcement that the tour participants should report to deck 3 reception 5 minutes earlier. We were all packed in there and the halls and stairwells. When it was actually 13:30 (remember that we’ve been late arriving everywhere) he led us down one deck of stairs and led us into the car deck by scanning our keycards one at a time to confirm that we were on the tour. Then he scanned onto the car deck one at a time the departing passengers. During this time, we heard the loudspeaker announcements about turning into Geiranger fjord, about the water, the mountains, the waterfalls, the seven sisters falls, the man with the bottle across from them, but all we saw was each other packed into the inside of the car deck breathing warm foul air and rocking against one another. The people who did not pack the high price for the excursion got to witness the sailing of Gerainger fjord twice as Nordkapp steamed out as soon as we were off. This was badly done. The good news is that the landscapes we toured on the excursion were phenomenal and the tour was well done. I still think highly of Nordkapp, but my opinion of Hurtigruten keeps lowering. We drove over Eagle’s road or route 63 to exit Geiranger. The first photostop was at the top. We could see the town of Geiranger from above and to the other end of the fjord, the seven sisters falls. The man with the bottle falls was on the other side and was not visible. The Geiranger fjord is kind of an s shape, so we only saw about half of it from the viewpoint. Better than nothing, I guess. But at the prices we’re paying, I guess I expect more than better than nothing. We drove on to Eidsdal where we drove the bus onto a ferry and crossed the fjord to Linge. We continued on route 63 to our next photostop at Gudbrandtsjuvet which was a series of foot bridges over a confluence of rapids and falls in gorges. It was amazing! Next stop was the highlight. It was Trollstigen Pass. There was a new visitor’s center there at the top of the 11 switchback road down the other side which lays between 2 big waterfalls. It is incredibly impressive. In addition there is the troll lore affiliated with the area and all the little rock piles built to appease the trolls. I built a tiny one to appease little trolls! At the bottom, we had a coffee break. It was complimentary and at 5-6pm, we all needed something. It was open face sandwiches and waffles with coffee or hot tea. The waffles were room temperature and folded in half with some powdered sugar inside. Maybe this the authentic Norwegian way to eat their traditional snack. We’ve been wondering as we ate ours that we made in the waffle iron in Bergen with jam and a knife and fork. We drove on down to Andalsnes and changed roads to E136 to Vestnes. We went through several tunnels to get there and it was because a tunnel on the other side before Molde that we had to go this way. Molde is the port where we rejoin Nordkapp and the tunnel on the other side before Molde closes at 6pm. When we got to Vestnes we drove onto a much larger ferry and took a much longer ride across the fjord to Molde. The first ferry ride was about 10 minutes, the second was about 30 minutes. We got to Molde at the Hotel Alexandra about 8pm I think. About an hour later we crossed the street to wait for Nordkapp to arrive. Dinner was lamb with gravy and mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts and dessert was an apple goo topped whipped cream with crumbles served in a short glass. At least we were spared the meal plan discussion at the restaurant door again. On that subject, at lunch I was pulled aside as I scanned my card and it bonged. The restaurant manager told us that she was assigning us table 24 at 6:30pm while this gets sorted out. That will start tomorrow night. In the meanwhile, the bus had wifi and Clay got our email on his phone. For whatever reason, Clay’s Outlook cannot access the Internet on the ship so we are doing all our email on the phone. It was our Kensington Tours booking agent. She confirmed that the ship was correct and that the booking did not include meals. She said she had tried to add the meal plan to our cruise with the company’s credit card, but that since we were already onboard with our own credit card attached to the shipboard account that she couldn’t. She blamed the Hurtigruten booking agent and told us to pay to add the meals and get an itemized invoice to send to her and Kensington Tours would reimburse us. Clay went to Reception to handle it since it is on his credit card. The guy asked to see Clay’s email, but Clay refused to let him see it. The ship was still waiting to hear from UK booking to find out whose fault this was and how to handle it. Anyway, within hours the phone showed the charge made to the Capital One card of $436.91US. Clay figures that is about $40 per meal at this point since the guy told Clay he would only bill him for future meals as it was clear we had already paid for meals and been told they were included so the blame for the error lay elsewhere. Clay just agreed with him. So, assumed he was paying for 2 lunches and 2 dinners remaining. We will seriously hope Kensington Tours does reimburse us when we get home and can scan the invoice and send it in.

We went to sleep ASAP after getting back onboard. I swear I didn’t hear Clay go to bed or anything all night. I woke up at what turned out to be 6am the next morning and I was exactly as I had laid down and my left ear was smashed and asleep. I got up to pee and learned it was time to be up anyway.

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Boarding Nordkapp

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

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Our room was next to the elevator and the noise cost us another night’s sleep. Clay says he’ll be glad to have one bed in one room for the next few nights. We’ll see. We were up pretty early and dressed for the day and for breakfast. We had the included buffet and then went up and packed up and checked out. We put our luggage in their storage room and set out for a day of sightseeing. We were early so we had to build a schedule around what was open first. That meant we went to Rosencrantz Tower first. It was fun and pretty amazing and mazelike. It was built in the 1560’s. Next in the same fortress area was Hakon’s Hall. It was largely modernized as it is still in use but it was built in 1247 to 1261. Next we visited Bryggens Museum. We were glad later that we took the time to watch the video about the Hanseatic League. As the weather was nice and our feet were tired, we next rode the Bergens Express little road train on a sightseeing trip of an hour. After that we had lunch at Madam Felle. Clay had a beer and a hamburger and I had tap water and a ham smorbord, which is an open sandwich. Lastly we visited the Hanseatic Museum and the Schotstuene. This is why we were glad we had watched that video in the other museum because otherwise we would not have had a clue about what was going on with the historic buildings and artifacts that we saw. We tried to see St. Mary’s church but it was closed until 1 July. We went back to the Clarion Collection for waffles and to pick up our luggage and await our tour prebooked taxi. The taxi was right on time at 4pm and we were off for Nordkapp.

The Hurtigruten terminal was across town, more or less. He drove right in and dropped us right in front of the door. We walked in and got in a line about 50 people long. It took about a half hour to get checked in. They took our 2 checked size bags and we kept the smaller ones. We went up an escalator with our envelope and the day’s newsletter. We found our keycards inside and our Geiranger tour tickets. We found someone else’s tour ticket in there as well. I returned it to the woman who checked our keycards into the safety briefing we were awaiting before boarding. She double checked with me that it wasn’t mine and then she ripped it up and threw it away. It had a cabin number on it and I could have delivered it myself if I’d known that she wouldn’t deliver it. We watched the safety briefing video and read our documents. We discovered we did not have a table/dining assignment, but the letter said to ask at the restaurant after boarding. We boarded around 5pm and were told cabins would not be available until 6pm when dinner would start. I went down to reception and the girl there scanned my keycard and told me we only had 4 breakfasts included. I told her I had paid for full board and she asked me to prove it. I went back up to my carryon bag and got our Kensington Tours itinerary. She pointed out to me that on day one in Oslo we did not have lunch or dinner included. I pointed out it was Oslo and that past Bergen all the way to Tromso all our meals onboard where shown as included. She agreed it was so and asked to take it and photocopy it for the Reception Manager. I agreed and she left and then brought it back. She said I would be contacted directly by the Reception Manager when he had an outcome to report. (It is the next day and I am still waiting. Clay and I have both asked at Reception and the Restaurant but no one will own the problem. In addition Outlook and AOL appear to be blocked so we can’t send or receive email except through Clay’s phone. It is not clear if I will be able to post entries to the blog either. That is the bad news, the good news is that Internet is complimentary although only on decks 4 and 7. Our cabin is 611 on deck 6.)

We finally got called to our cabins at dinner time. We had luggage so we went directly to 611. Our checked bags were in the hall and we unlocked the door and moved them in. This is not the smallest ship cabin we’ve ever had, but it is the most poorly designed. There are no beds but pull down cots, so there is nowhere to store the luggage. There is also no cupboard space to put the clothes. You can’t open the bathroom door if someone is sitting in the one chair at the desk and you can only see out the window if you’re standing up anyway. Clay is rethinking the advantages of a different hotel room every night.

As part of my conversation with reception earlier, she called the restaurant manager and they agreed to feed us dinner tonight while this issue is in dispute. You have to scan your keycard every time you enter the restaurant just like leaving or boarding a ship. Mine bonged but the girl manning the station had my cabin # written on her palm.  The reason they let us eat tonight is that it is open seating buffet on Bergen embarkation night. It was not very good but it sounds like it was a bigger selection that are offered on the other nights. If it weren’t for already paying for the meals it might be worth just forgetting about it and trying to survive off the snack bar/café. We’ll keep you posted, assuming we can post.

We had an English language information meeting at 9pm. We went and the tour manager shared some information about where things are onboard and how they work. Mostly it was about tours and meals and dining assignments. Since we only have the one tour for tomorrow and evidently no meal/dining assignments it was hard to cull anything meaningful from it. His weather predictions seem as meaningless as anyone else’s. He said it would be chilly but clear and windless in Geiranger tomorrow. As I type this the next morning, it is snowing in Geiranger according to weather.com. It is expected to warm into the mid-40s and rain all afternoon. It does not bode well for our expensive afternoon off the Nordkapp.

The curtains in the cabin are unlined so in addition to sunset at 23:37 and sunrise at 3:37am there are lights on the outside deck 5 so it is never dark enough to promote sleep. In addition, I forgot to say that you have to keep a keycard in the wall slot to keep the electricity on to the cabin. That means to keep chargers charging we have to leave one behind in the cabin.

So, I was able to post this entry. Clay says he will not get photos linked in to the entries until we are on land. I am not sure exactly what he means by that but it may not be until we reach Tromso for 2 nights. I think that is at least 3 nights away. Sorry!

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A bus and a train to Bergen

Monday, June 22, 2015

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Stalheim Hotel. Dinner last night was another Norwegian buffet. It was mostly fish but also had a deer stew. Where would they find a deer here? We have been amazed at the lack of wildlife other than birds in all this remoteness. Anyway… They had chicken in gravy so I thought I was covered as I ate my beef noodle soup. Clay came back and told me that the entire pan was filled with nothing but drumsticks. I ate gravy and white rice along with a side of the vegetarian option of quinoa in tomato sauce. Desserts were not a strong suit so we ate double portions trying to get it right! Both restaurants had a trilogy of sauces which must be a local thing. Vanilla, chocolate and a burnt sugar style caramel. We were told that coffee and tea were included and would be brought round to the tables when we got to dessert, but none appeared. You would think that coffee and tea would be included here or complimentary but they aren’t they are for sale at 30NOK in the lobby. There are no tea or coffee making facilities in the room, not even the European obligatory kettle for those who DIY. In a room this huge with all the extra furniture that just seems very odd.

We slept well. As Clay pointed out since there is no in-room Internet, no TV and only walking and dinner or breakfast and sleeping, you better hope you sleep well. Our room faces east so we had it a little darker than usual. It was overcast so the sun did not shine in this morning either. It may be the first time we’ve slept a solid 8 hours in one night in weeks.

Breakfast this morning was a raucous affair. The good news is that I guess because of our booking status or something, when we give our room number in the restaurant that we have a reserved 4-top by the window and it is all ours! The bad news is that last night 2 buses loaded with Asian tourists arrived just in time for dinner. The worse news is that this morning there were 7 visible buses and the restaurant was completely filled. We saw our table from last night sitting empty and hoped, yes it was still our reserved table. We had to fight the crowds though. Again, a lot of fish. There were only 4 hot dishes. What looked like strips of uncooked fat that I assume were bacon, beans, scrambled eggs and oatmeal. I had oatmeal, and I had yogurt with granola. I am on an all grain diet now! I went back and made an open face sandwich of whole grain bread, brown cheese, white cheese, ham and salami. Some protein. I don’t even know what all Clay ate. I had coffee finally. I needed have desired it. It was the worst coffee I have ever choked down. They may not be making it readily available out of embarrassment, though I assume profit is the actual motive.

Checkout is 11:30am which is rather good news because our bus won’t be by until 11:55am. Those who read yesterday’s post may have worked out what just occurred to us. That we’ll be skipping lunch again today due to the travel schedule and no lunch service here. I still think Try Norway should have made accommodations for this lapse in the schedule and availability. We should have about 45 minutes in Voss between the bus and the train and we’ll assume we can find something to buy for lunch there or on the train between 1 and 3. We will be on the same train we were on from Oslo the other day and will hope that the tracks between Voss and Bergen have reopened. But, we were in Comfort Class the other day and today we’ll be in 2^nd class. It should be a much shorter ride so we’ll hope for the best. The last lapse we can find in the Try Norway itinerary is that it looks like it is over a mile from the train station to our Clarion hotel in Bergen and there is no transportation arranged or suggested. Not even a marked map! Just the note to find your way from the station to the hotel!  Tonight is our last hotel for a while. Tomorrow we board the Nordkapp for our northbound ferry ride through the fjords.

We checked out early and left our bags in the lobby while we wandered back up to Wilhelms Hoi. The marker stone in the historic buildings park. Then we just sat inside and out and enjoyed the views. The bus was a little late so we had a chance to worry. The bus ride was great today. Yesterday's driver barely spoke in reply but today's was making announcements about what we were seeing. He drove down the hairpins turn road that we walked a part of yesterday and stopped for photos. He told us about an extreme sports competition this week in Voss that explained all the skateboarders, bicyclists, kayakers, etc. we were seeing. He told us to look for the kite flyers. We saw them as we waited for the train. The train in Voss was late too, so we got to worry some more. I guess it worked out OK though since we are here in Bergen. We are at the Clarion Collection Hotel Havnekontoret. I have no idea how to say that and I hope I don’t ever have to! I used the hotel voucher to give the cab driver the hotel name and address and now I don’t have it anymore. I can’t find the hotel name on anything they gave us like a keycard. Tomorrow we have a transfer included to the ferry/ship so hopefully we really won’t need to get back here other than on our own. It is a nice waterfront location in an old looking building in a very old part of town. Unfortunately, our view room ended this morning. Tonight’s small room#209 has a view of a parking lot and the windows of 3 other buildings. We arrived after 4pm since the train was running late. We also had about a 20-minute wait for a taxi. That cost about $20. Not unreasonable since it was just too far to walk with luggage on cobblestones. We checked right in and our room was ready with no wait. We were informed that waffles were being served in the dining room until 6pm. That the evening meal would be served from 6 to 9pm. Breakfast will be served from 6:30 to 9:30am. Checkout is 12:30pm. We will probably checkout after breakfast and go sightseeing and let them hold our luggage. Our transfer is at 4pm. Clay plans to come back for waffles before the pickup. I am not sure we’re entitled to waffles tomorrow, but Clay pointed out that no one was checking. We’ll see. They were weird thin waffles. I think maybe pizzelles. They had a 2 piece waffle iron and batter and it was DIY. We made one 2-piece batch and each ate one with fruit jam as topping. I had a cup of coffee too. Then we set out. Clay had it in mind to find Bergen Segways and take a tour. We walked up the harbor and visited the fish market. I noticed the first fishcakes of the trip and somehow Clay did not. We walked on around and down to C. Sundts gate 60 where Bergen Segway says they are located. It was a vacant building without any signage. We arrived minutes before their 5:15pm should have been departing. They are clearly not there anymore, but their website seems to still be taking online bookings. We’ll just avoid them now. They had their chance with the walk down there and back for nothing. It was well out of our way. We walked back more or less the same way to get to Floyen to take the funicular up to the top of the mountain. It was 85NOK pp for a return ticket. It was pretty amazing. We saw Silver Whisper sail out. Le Boreal is docked right in front of our hotel, not that we could tell from our parking lot window. We went back down and into a Starbucks. They had a mug but it had a bust of Edvard Grieg on it. That won’t mean anything to me even with the word Bergen on it, so I didn’t buy a mug. We stopped at a needlework shop on the way back through the line of colorful old wooden buildings. We found a cross-stitch pattern with a map of Norway, so we had to buy it for Mom to make us a souvenir of the trip! It was less expensive than the Great Glen map of Scotland. I know because it was about the price 445NOK of a meal in Oslo! We wandered some more old buildings and then found a bakery selling skillingsboller, Norwegian cinnamon buns. They didn’t look to good, but we bought one to go. (It wasn’t very good. It was light and yeasty but not very sweet or very cinnamon.) We got back for our included dinner. There were a large selection of cold dishes like various salads. In hot foods, there was a creamy vegetable soup that I liked. Clay tried the traditional Norwegian fish cakes when I told him they had been at all the fish market stalls, but he didn’t care for it. He mostly ate the cold foods. There was a weird vanilla pudding/jello thing that Clay tried and told me to avoid. That was the whole day. Clay is sleeping waiting for me to get off the Internet. Evidently, only one person at a time can be logged in!

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A boat and a bus to Stalheim

Sunday, June 21, 2015

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Norway is AH-mazing! We were up unnecessarily early again this morning at the Fretheim Hotel in Flam. But, that turned out to be a good thing because it gave us a chance to walk to places we hadn’t seen yesterday and to have the different sharp angle of the morning sun. We also got to see the Marco Polo cruise ship sail in and dock in Flam. After sailing part way out on the ferry this morning, that had to be amazing! They arrived in Flam about 9am so I don’t know how long they had been sailing up the fjord, but when they got to Flam it looked like they were standing 2-3 deep at the rails. We had a good buffet breakfast and for the first time I will find fault with our detailed instructions. We should have been advised that after breakfast and traveling all morning, we would arrive at Stalheim Hotel at noon in the middle of absolutely nowhere and they only serve breakfast and lunch! We should have been advised of this so we could buy and/or pack something, or the Stalheim could be prepared to feed us. We did a lot of walking today on our snacks that we’ve been carrying and buying here and there for just in case and this was one. It was a long time from breakfast at 7am and dinner at 6:30pm. If that is the only misstep in this 17 day itinerary, I guess we’ll count ourselves lucky. Of course Kensington Tours and Try Norway turn us loose when we leave the mainland of Norway for Svalbard, so some of that 17 days will be on us!

Norwegian breakfast buffet. Clay liked the fish pudding and the pickled herring. I liked the barley porridge and the Norwegian pancakes (similar to Swedish but a bit thicker). We both tried the local brown cheese and liked it but we need to figure out why it is brown. We were first in line for the 9am ferry to Gudvangen by being early. Not that it mattered, it wasn’t very full and we didn’t find a good place to be forward and outside to take photos. We sat outside on the back near the port side and could walk back and forth easily when they told us to look at something. There must have been 100 or more awesome waterfalls. There were several little villages. We stopped at one, Aurland. It has a shoe factory. We did not stop at Undredal but it has a stave church and it is where they make the brown cheese. We arrived in Gudvangen right on time at 11:25am. It was a bit of a free for all to get the bus to Stalheim Hotel. Our instructions said to walk up the pier to the awaiting bus and let the driver know we’re going to the Stalheim Hotel, but there were a dozen buses there. The only one with a sign said it was going to Bergen and there was no driver to be found, but it was swarmed with about 50 people shoving their luggage under it. I walked on down and tried to find another bus and driver. Every man I spoke to told me that the bus to Bergen was the bus to Stalheim and the only bus to Stalheim. That was not actually true, but we got some of the last inches of luggage storage (which was a good thing since our luggage had to come off first!) and a couple of the last half dozen seats. It turned out when we got off at Stalheim Hotel that the first driver I had spoken to in Gudvangen was driving an almost empty bus behind us as he arrived at the hotel as we were pulling our luggage up. Good thing because there were at least 8-10 people standing outside the hotel at 11:55am when we arrived and they all rushed the door when the driver opened it to let us 2 off. He told them he could only take 2 and the youngest jumped up the stairs with her ticket. He had to back her off as he had to go open the luggage hold for us. The others asked him when the next bus would be by to pick them up and we never heard him reply. But he never replied to us either! The good news is that there was a 2^nd bus right behind and it let off a couple and had maybe 6 people left onboard and only had to pick up the less than a dozen who got left by our bus. At least now, we have some idea what to expect tomorrow when we leave here!

Last night’s Fretheim and tonight’s Stalheim are Historic Hotels of Europe. They are both pretty amazing. Tonight’s room is huge! We have the most spectacular view! We should have checked our itinerary more carefully so we would have realized about lunch here and the fact the hotel is all by itself between 2 huge waterfalls. There is nothing else around. All there is to do is hike! It turned out that the easiest hike we might have done was wiped out over the winter by an avalanche and has not been repaired. We walked part of the Old King’s Road a 13-hairpin turn steep road with views of both waterfalls. It isn’t a long road as the crow flies, but they said it would take about 4 hours to walk down and back. Now we understand! It was steep! We only walked 5 or 6 of the hairpins before deciding that we had seen enough and going back up. We’d have never survived the whole walk down and up. We found the memorial marker for Per Sivle, a famous Norwegian poet who lived near here and was born in Flam. Since the weather was still nice I decided that we should walk the hotel’s historic Folk Museum. It is only open to guided tours, but I guess not today. I asked if we could still walk through the park of old buildings and they said yes. We just couldn’t go in but we could look in the windows. We did and have no idea what we were looking at. We found the marker for Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit in the 1890’s.  It finally clouded over and we were feeling beat so we came inside. According to the locals, we have been having exceptional weather. They claim that May was very cold and wet and summer has only just arrived. Lucky!

The other things that we should have realized when planning this but it just wasn’t on our radar was the summer solstice. It is on June 21, so today. The longest day of the year. Now, we did realize that going as far North as we’re going at this time of year that we’d have long days but we had not thought about what it meant to be here for the longest. All Norway, and the rest of the Baltic countries, are losing it over this event and they are celebrating it this weekend. The last day of school was Friday and all Norway is on their way to summer homes and vacations, etc. Everywhere we have been in the Baltics has talked about the effects of living with the long days of summer but especially the short days of winter. They talk about winter suicides and summer vacations. I don’t understand why they just don’t take their month of vacation in January or February to somewhere warm and sunny and enjoy the long warm days of summer at home, problem solved. Canada cannot be the only place with snowbirds, can it?

We don’t have Internet in the room here, so I will post this without discussing dinner. I may have to come back and edit it later. Clay will have to add photos later too.

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A car and 2 trains to Flam

Saturday, June 20, 2015

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Clay was up first this morning. We were up early enough to be able to move slowly so that was good. We went down early to check out and turn in our tour package voucher. We also picked up our sacks. These turned out to be lunches and not breakfasts but that was okay. I also got some ice for my water bottle. Clay ate his sandwich while we waited for the driver to the train station. He had a nasty surprise when he bit into a slice of green bell pepper. After that he took it apart and found buttered bread with a slice of cheese and a slice of ham, a slice of red bell pepper and a cucumber slice. I immediately took mine apart and removed the offending vegetables. Clay said the rest of the sandwich was good. Each sack also contained a pear. We moved Clay’s pear into my sack and then the driver arrived. We finally used to Oslo tunnel today to get to the Sentral train station. It was on the far side of the port from where we docked before. It was past the Opera House. The driver took our voucher when he picked us up. When he got us to the station, he took half the luggage and walked us inside. We were too early for our departure track to be posted but he said it was usually track 3. We sat and waited. I went in 7-Eleven and bought a strawberry yogurt and ate it for my breakfast. I had 2 cups of Nespresso coffee in the room, but they also had to go cups from the lobby. The train arrived on track 3 and we found car 1 in comfort class and fortunately our seats 39 & 40 were facing forward. Half the seats on the train were facing backward! It was a toss-up as to which side was more scenic. It was very scenic! It was very roomy and comfortable and when it was working you could serve yourself hot beverages. We had a voucher for this train too. There were at least 18 cars because when I got to our seats a man was there with his luggage. He asked if I spoke English and showed me his ticket and he was in car 18. Ours was the first train that came while we sat out at the tracks that was in different number order. We had moved to the far end from the station because all the trains that came had car 1 at that end. Ours was reversed but like us, people had arranged themselves per the order of the prior trains. The ticket taker must have started at the high numbered cars at the other end because it took him over an hour to get to us. There was a problem with the trains being repaired between Voss and Bergen today and since this train was going to terminate in Bergen he had to tell everyone going all the way that they would be put on a bus in Voss. The day after tomorrow I think we take the train from Voss to Bergen so I hope it is fixed by then. We had a beautiful, sunny day today with amazing scenery. We got off the Oslo-Bergen train in Myrdal. We did not understand what was meant by only a short stop in Finse and missed getting off for a photo opportunity of the glacier nearby. In Myrdal, we had about 20 minutes to stand and fight for a spot on the platform. The Flam train was about 30 minutes late. There were hundreds of people waiting. The train is ticketed as open seating except at the far end of the train from the station apparently. We were told that those cars were pre-reserved for tour groups and we kept being shunted along until we were all the way to the first/last car. The trains just go back and forth on this very steep and twisty 20km track between Myrdal and Flam. So, it came into Myrdal engine first and left by returning the same way it had just come and the engine was last. We were in the last, then the first car. The checked luggage occupied the front half of our car, so there was no forward view and no forward door. We did manage to get seats. We sat on the left next to a young couple from western NY. I was able to face forward and Clay sat opposite me. They were the only seats I could have gotten us and I felt lucky to get them even though Clay was not happy about not being by the window. I suspect there were a lot of people who did not even get seats. It is only an hour ride and there is a lot to see with a 5-minute photo stop at Kjosfossen waterfall. It would have been miserable though if the aisles had been full of standing people though since we all came for the views. We got to Flam about 2:45pm. We collected our checked bags and walked over to the Fretheim Hotel, our home for the night. We will have dinner and breakfast tomorrow here included. We got in a line in the lobby. Most of the people in front of us were offered to check their luggage because their rooms weren’t ready until 4pm. Our room was supposed to be a fjord view with a balcony and it was ready! We got our keys, turned in our voucher, provided a credit card for incidentals and went to room 210. We dropped our luggage and went out exploring. It is a very small touristic village, but in a stunning setting. We visited the Flam railway museum and the grocery store. We walked through several shops and checked out several viewpoints. We scoped out where we will meet our ferry to Gudvangen in the morning.

We are old and tired, but today was a stellar day in a spectacular landscape.

We elected to have the Norwegian Buffet for dinner tonight at 6:30pm instead of a fixed 2 course meal. There was a pepper sauce on the main course that we both thought we’d find objectionable, otherwise it probably would have been fine.

I will stop now before dinner and post this. If dinner or anything else this evening is memorable, I will write about it tomorrow or come back and edit this entry.

I am back dinner was not memorable. There was a lot of fish that Clay said was good. I forgot to write about lunch. Clay ate both pears. Yesterday at breakfast there were small tubes (like the size the dentist gives you) of fish and something like Nutella). Clay put 2 in his pocket and showed me in the elevator. I was all grossed out because he had fish paste in his pockets. He meant to get the chocolate hazelnut paste, so he went back down and swapped. Today for lunch, we took one piece of bread off the sandwich and I put the tubes of paste on one and ate it open face. Clay took the slice of ham & of cheese and folded the other piece of bread in half and had a half sandwich. Viola! Lunch for 2. We also had some cookies we've been carrying around and I had a hot chocolate while the machine was in order.

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