June 30 - Edinburgh

No blog posting from me yesterday, since it was just a tiring and difficult travel day for us as we made the journey from Southampton to Edinburgh by coach, taxi, train, and taxi again, with endless delays all along the way.

Our hotel room in Edinburgh, which is clean and functional, naturally suffers by comparison with our ship stateroom!

I was on the hunt today to see memorials at Edinburgh Castle to some of my famous Scots ancestors who are connected to me through my 7th-great-grandmother, Helena Lindsay, who lived from 1643 to 1698 in Bristol. I have traced my line back to Helena personally; her ancestors have been researched by others, and they include more and more historical figures as we go farther back in time. [My other ancestors were labourers and farmers and weavers and such, and have proven impossible so far to trace back much farther than Helena Lindsay's time.] I have had a great time in the last couple of years learning about these very distant noble ancestors of mine - I certainly didn't pay much attention to their "life and times" in history classes at school.

Katherine hadn't visited the Castle for awhile, so off we went this morning. We took a hop-on-hop-off tourist bus as an easy way to get there, and that worked out very well for us.

My 20th great-grandfather met us at the Castle gates. King Robert the Bruce was the great-grandson of William Marshal who I visited at the Temple Church in London two weeks ago.

A little farther into the castle grounds we saw the plaque commemorating Thomas Randolph who took back the Castle in 1313 after 20 years occupation by the English.

Then we came to a beautiful chapel dedicated to Saint Margaret of Scotland who was a Queen of Scotland who lived from 1045 to 1093, so we are really getting far back in time. She was King Robert the Bruce's 4th great-grandmother, so I get to claim her too. It was her son King David I of Scotland who built the chapel in his mother's honour.

As well as visiting the relatives we took lots of pictures that I can't post because the hotel has only very low speed Internet. We had lunch at the Castle, and visited all the Castle gift shops, and then made our way down the Royal Mile. I can't show you that either, but I encourage you to look at the Royal Mile pictures my nephew posted on his blog here. Alex is spending the summer travelling in Europe and he was in Edinburgh several weeks ago.

At Katherine's suggestion we visited St_Giles'_Cathedral, which proved very interesting. I have seen it from the outside on several earlier visits to Edinburgh, but this was the first time that I can remember going inside.

By late afternoon we were back on the tourist bus and happy to be off our feet for the rest of our sightseeing. We saw a guard of bagpipers in full dress milling about outside of the Holyrood House and the Scottish Parliament. We've just learned on the TV news that the Queen is here today and that she inspected them shortly after we passed by. Apparently she will be opening the Scottish Parliament tomorrow.

So that is it for our first day in Edinburgh. Tomorrow we are off to Dumfries-shire to track down some of Katherine's ancestors.

Heading towards Southampton

Our last day on the cruise started the same as all our other days - with breakfast at the specialty restaurant that serve breakfast exclusively to suite passengers. Thanks to our free upgrade, this includes us. Today we decided to take a picture of the menu.

It's the same menu every day, but I don't think Katherine and I have had the same breakfast twice.

You probably can't read that, so let me elaborate. As soon as we arrive, our waiter brings strong English tea for Katherine and a cappuccino for me, and only then do we order. Here is the menu enlarged.

This is the reason that on several cruise days we haven't been the least bit hungry for lunch, and have just waited for dinner. (Though yes, I do admit there was that one day when we thought we were hungry enough mid-afternoon to order high tea in the cabin. Big mistake!)

The free upgrade that we got the most $$ value from was the complimentary Internet, which is usually very expensive on a ship.  Free laundry was also great, and we'll be heading to Scotland tomorrow with clean clothes in our bags, no thanks to any effort on our part. They put the actual cost of doing our laundry on our bills before zeroing it out again. This perk has been worth about $65 each, and has saved us so much time and hassle coping with the ship's laundromat that I may decide it's worth paying for if when I cruise again.

I don't suppose they treat someone to such a great upgrade twice in a row, and so it is going to be harder cruising again without the "suite amenities" now that I know what they are!

We are pretty much all packed up now and have to put our bags outside the door by 10pm for collection and offloading in Southampton in the morning. We have a good disembarkation time - 9am - especially considering that we have to put the clocks back an hour to English time tonight. So we'll get an extra hour's sleep.

This time tomorrow night we should be at our hotel in Edinburgh, all being well. I hope we have the connectivity promised by the hotel.

June 27 - Stavanger

Today started with a 6am arrival in Stavanger, which is the farthest south we have been in Norway. The port is very near the centre of town, and this is really all I got to see of the place.

By 8:30am I was on a boat ride to a tropical garden just outside Stavanger.

The family who own the garden have a nursery business in Stavanger and originally started the garden on the island where they had their summer cabin as a hobby. They have enlarged it year by year, and have been experimenting to see which plants they can get to thrive there. They have been growing palm trees farther north than anyone else they are aware of, largely due to a sheltered location. Bamboo is there as well:

We've seen houses and huts all over Norway with grass growing on the roof, but none quite as fancy as this one:

Water flows throughout the garden,



...and the fjord can be seen in the distance.

I was back at the ship by 11am, and met up with Katherine who had spent the morning exploring the town. After lunch we went together on a cruise of the Lysefjord.

The scenery was quite different from Geiranger Fjord last week, partly because we were in a small boat that could get in very close to the cliffs. 

And this is Pulpit Rock seen from the boat. You can see the view from up top here. That must be spectacular!

 

On the way back we saw some goats who are regularly fed by the ship's crew:

And this final shot is shows how close we got to the cliffs. The captain headed into a tiny cove, just to show off, I think.

And now we are back in our room again after another great meaL in the dining room. We have left Norway and will have a final day at sea tomorrow.

June 26 - heading south

There were beautiful blue skies and calm seas today as we sailed towards Stavanger, our final port in Norway. We followed the coastline all day, and are now seeing increasing sea traffic. Katherine has binoculars and checks out all the ships we see.

Last night was our last night of midnight sun. We are now back well below the Arctic Circle, and will actually have a sunset tonight at 11:21 pm.

It was a typical "at sea" day for us - port lecture in the morning, then a culinary demonstration and galley tour. After lunch we went to another talk from our Explorers speaker - this time she spoke about Sir Francis Drake. (Captain Cook is still my favourite though.) In between these, I got quite a bit of stitching done and Katherine finished another book.

Tonight was a Formal dinner, so we got all dressed up one last time. Then we went off to see one of the shows.

So the day flew by, and now we are counting up our Norwegian Kroner so we know just how much we each have to spend tomorrow on our last day in Norway.
Ahhh... it's a tough life!

June 25 - Lofoten Islands

36 hours after leaving Spitsbergen we are still above the Arctic Circle, at 68 degrees latitude. Caring about latitude was new to me until this trip, other than knowing where 49 degrees latitude north is.

Today I went to Nusfjord, a UNESCO world heritage fishing village with many wooden buildings preserved as they were in the 19th century.

Cod is the primary fish still caught here, and the village includes a cod liver oil factory, and "stocks" for drying the codfish as we had seen all over Norway.

Here's my favourite dried fish:

And more views of the village:

We drove for awhile around the islands, enjoying the scenery. It was good to see greenery in the landscape again, after the starkness of Spitsbergen.

Can you find the lamb in this picture?

Hint: The lamb is lying down after grazing on the roof of the barn. First find the bird in front of the chimney, then look behind it, a little to the left.

Our second stop was at the Lofotr Viking Museum. This was a reconstructed chieftain's longhouse, furnished as it would have been around 600 AD. It was abandoned about 950 AD when the whole community left to settle in Iceland.

A familiar sight from our trip to Denmark:

We heard a great presentation inside the longhouse from a guide in Viking dress.



The community kept to its belief in Norse gods like Thor and Odin.

Rejection of Christianity as the rest of Norway was accepting it is believed to be one of the reasons for the emigration to Iceland.

Here is someone else we saw in Denmark. Heather or Alex, can you remind me of his name?

More from the longhouse:

Then we had some more great views of the fjords on our way back to the dock.



June 24 - Heading south again

Today was another quiet pleasant day at sea. It wasn't nearly as rough as two days ago on our trip up to Spitsbergen.

I am finding the midnight sun to be confusing. I had expected a kind of twilight and maybe an almost-sunset, but this far north it just stays bright all night.

Here is last night at midnight, from our room:

Bright sun at midnight

The room steward always makes up our room while we are at dinner, so we come back from our meal to find the curtains closed and the lights turned on. Since we came north, we have started having to immediately turn out the lights and throw open the curtains to let the sunlight in. A bizarre ritual, but I think the stewards are not allowed to deviate from the standard process for preparing a room for the evening.

I have been able to stitch very late at night - the light is just that bright.

When we are ready to sleep, we are finding that even with the curtains closed tightly, the room is not dark enough, so we have been using our sleep masks that we each had for the overnight flight from home.

Maybe as we get farther south again we will see some of the midnight sun skies that I had expected.



June 23 - Longyearbyen in the Spitsbergen Islands

As forewarned, there was no Internet connection from the Spitsbergen Island, so here we are "the morning after".

Our day in the most northerly point of our trip was sunny and about 5C. The air was crystal clear, with a crisp quality to the light.

We were told that the Islands have a vegetation coverage of only about 7%, with glaciers covering around 60%, and the rest is bare. They have a stark beauty, as we first saw from the ship as we approached.

How is this for an isolated house:

The main settlement of the islands occurred in the early 1900's when coal mining companies established villages for their workers. I had assumed that our port, Longyearbyen, was a purely Nowegian name, but in fact it was named for an American mine owner surnamed Longyear. Coal mining remains a major industry and we saw signs of it as soon as we disembarked.

These entrepreneurial boys are not running a lemonade stand - that's lumps of coal that they are selling to us tourists!

And the girls in the background are selling fossils.

The ship's passengers outnumbered the town's population, but the residents were well prepared for our invasion. I am sure there are stores for the residents somewhere, but all we saw during our time in town were the tourist shops (Norwegian knits by the hundreds), and several Arctic outfitters' stores as well since this is the launching place for scientific expeditions northward to the North Pole. We saw a cavalcade of Zodiacs ferrying luggage and supplies out to one ship anchored in the harbour.

There is a fine museum in town where we saw the Islands' most famous wildlife...

and some favourites of mine from a Newfoundland trip - puffins:

The museum also had a film with the best time-lapse photography of glaciers "surging" that I have ever seen. These showed Spitsbergen glaciers flowing several meters a day until they got back into equilibrium and slowed down again. Fascinating! There is likely a good clip of this on Youtube.

Polar bear signs were everywhere in Longyearbyen.

We were told not to walk outside the town. The townspeople carry guns for protection against the bears when they travel, and many of the shops had signs at their doors saying not to bring weapons inside. But as these were tourist shops, I imagine these signs were for our benefit.

There was a parking lot for the townpeople's snowmobiles - their most common form of transportation:

The houses reflect the town's origins as a mining town, but they are painted different colours to achieve variety.

A boat in the harbour reminded me of the colours the boats in Malta are painted:

The harbour was at the edge of town. If you walked the wrong way, away from Longyearbyen, you faced this "Yield to polar bears" sign:

 

The Norwegian words mean "applies to all of Svalbard".

We were back on the ship by mid-afternoon, and we decided that this was the perfect day to order Tea for Two in our room. (yes, it's really called that on the room service menu). Here's what two waiters brought us:

This was way over the top... Scones on the top plate, then clotted cream and strawberry jam, then savouries, then cookies, then cakes. Good grief! was about all we could say (besides Katherine wishing they had included a teapot for the tea, and not just a vacuum container of hot water).

Needless to say, there is plenty left over for us to have today. You certainly don't go hungry aboard a ship.

Then it was sailaway time, and we headed back down south, past these unusual and beautiful islands.

We went up on deck at midnight to have our pictures taken in the midnight sun. We'll see how they turned out tonight.

June 22 - En route to the Spitsbergen Islands

Today we have been rocking and rolling our way across the Barents Sea sailing even farther north, from the top of mainland Norway on our way to the Svalbard archipelogo. Its largest island is Spitsbergen, the name I am more familiar with.

We went to a lecture this morning about Captain James Cook, my hero from my South Pacific cruise. It was good to hear about him again - it seems appropriate to remember what the early explorers did and the conditions they experienced when we are at sea in such comfort. Each room in our corridor of Window Suite staterooms is named for an early Maritime explorer. We are in the Alessandro Malaspina suite. He sounds like a Spanish version of Captain Cook. His name was already familiar to Katherine because there are many places named for him in B.C.

The seas got progressively worse all day - Force 7 to 8 winds and 4m waves - and they closed the outside decks. But Katherine is proving herself to be a good sailor, and I like the action myself.

Over dinnertime the winds appear to have calmed down considerably, and I am hopeful that we will have a clear day in Spitsbergen.

We have been warned about the lack of internet satellite reception while docked tomorrow, so I may be late in posting about our adventures at only 10 degrees latitude south of the North Pole.

Monday June 20th in Tromsø

Our ship crossed the Arctic Circle yesterday with no ceremony whatsoever - so different from the party and ceremony when I crossed the equator by ship on the way to Australia a few years ago!

We reached Tromsø right at the top of Norway at 6am, and Katherine and I left on our visit to the town about 9:30am. We had dressed in layers as advised, but immediately started peeling off the outer layers as we realized we were going to have another clear and warm (15C) day.

Our first stop was at a cable car that took us up a mountain for a great view:

From the mountain top we could see the landmark "Arctic Cathedral" - our next stop:

Can you spot Katherine on her way into the church?

Then we were off to the Tromsø Museum. Blooming outside were tulips:

So now I have seen tulips in April and May at home, in March in England, in June in Norway, and in October in Tasmania.  Hmmm... I feel another quest coming on.

The best part of the Museum was the Sami exhibit.

Sami handwork

Norwegian "runestein"

The ship was leaving early, at 3pm, so there was no time for meandering about town.  So we relaxed aboard for the remainder of the day.