I wrote this last night, but I wasn’t able to get it posted. Today (Friday … last day on the boat) the Internet seems to be quite stable so I’m catching up!

We’re sailing away from Norway. We left the Bergen harbor about 6:15 p.m. this evening. It’s now about 10:30 p.m. and the sun is just setting in the northwest. It’ll be back up in about three hours. Tomorrow is a sea day and we’ll arrive in Rotterdam on Saturday morning about 8 a.m. and the cruise will be over. It seems like we just got on the boat and it’s almost time to get off.

Norway was just plain fun and very interesting. I probably have a couple hundred pictures of waterfalls and another couple hundred pictures of houses and farms along the fjords. That doesn’t count the several hundred pictures of towns and people. In total I’ve taken close to two thousand pictures…. Come over for a week and I’ll show you my vacation pictures! I have deleted a few pictures, but not very many as they all are just too good. Maybe in a week or so I can be a little more realistic.

I’m sitting out on our veranda facing west. There is a freighter about two miles west of us keeping pace with us. We’ve passed a couple of oil drilling platforms. There’s another smaller cruise ship behind us that we passed a while ago. It’s about sixty degrees out on the veranda. Very nice weather. I’m listening to my iPod (Beethoven), cataloging pictures, and writing this blog entry. In a few minutes I’ll go downstairs to the library and see if the Internet connection is working. If so, I’ll post this entry and check email. Otherwise it’ll happen tomorrow. We’re getting far enough south that the Internet is getting more reliable.

The picture with this post is of a rather spectacular waterfall we passed last evening as we were leaving Geirenger. This fjord was one of the more picturesque of the trip. The railings were crowded with people taking in the scenery and taking pictures. As we went through a fairly narrow part of the fjord, a coastal liner passed us going into Geiranger (a town of 250 inhabitants, but yesterday with three cruise ships in port, there were about 5,000 people in town). The coastal line blew it’s whistle (which had a lovely echo) and then the Rotterdam answered with it’s deep-throated whistle which echoed for quite some time. That was certainly lovely. I was taking a bit of movie film with my little Sony CyberShot camera and kind of captured the sounds.

I’d love to come back to Norway again, but next time probably not by cruise ship as it’d really be fun to spend more than a few hours in some of these small towns. My son-in-law Scott commented on my blog entry about Tromso where he had participated in a NATO exercise some years ago. That town is bidding for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. Norway has won more skiing-related medals in the Olympics than any other nation. They take the skiing quite seriously and we passed a couple of ski jumps in the hills as we did some touring. Cross-country skiing is a passion. Our guide in Tromso characterized the weather as ten months of snow and two months of bad skiing.

Bergen was interesting. Close to a quarter-million people live there so it was much more like most cities in Europe. There sere SEVEN cruise ships in the harbor today, including a Costa ship with close to 4,000 passengers. Our tour went to Edvard Grieg’s home, but there were so many people there we didn’t see anything. We went to a Stave Church (it had been rebuilt after some Satanists in 1992 torched the original structure built in the 1300’s). That was interesting, but we could only be there a short time because so many tour groups were lined up to do the same tour. So, all in all Bergen was just OK. That’s why it’d be good to come back sometime other than on a cruise!

My favorite spot on this trip was Geirenger. We took a tour that went up the side of the mountain … zig-zag-zig-zag … for 4,500 feet to the top of a mountain overlooking the fjord. It was spectacular. Europeans are getting into motorhomes. We have seen many of them on the roads and in campgrounds. Maybe that’s the way to tour Norway?

Next would be either Flam or Stavenger. Both of them were also very interesting towns with beautiful countryside around them. Next would come HonnigsvÃ¥g and North Cape. The Arctic tundra and landscape is so dramatically different than all the rest of Norway. We had clouds and rain while we were there. I’d like to go back around summer solstice again when the skies were clear to see the sun not set. We knew that it didn’t because it didn’t get dark. But, the sun stayed well hidden.

I’m not ready for this to be over and to go back to work. However, if I want to do anything like this again, it is definitely back to work! Bye bye, Norway!