The trip is over. The suitcases are 90% unpacked and put away (with only the other 90% remaining). It’s bedtime. Tomorrow reality starts once again. It’s good to be home.

We’re in the Hampton Inn at the Denver Airport and will continue the trip home this afternoon at 3:10 p.m. Meanwhile some good friends from Colorado Springs will be stopping by in about an hour for a short visit. We’ll take the 12:45 shuttle bus to the airport for checkin. The night’s sleep was only fitfull and both of us were up quite early. Tonight we’ll be in our own beds. Question is: Will our bodies remember? Or will we have to get readjusted to yet another bed?

We’re at the Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. waiting for our next flight. This place is absolutely mobbed. The flight is sold out and they are asking for volunteers. So far the price isn’t worth it! The flight from Amsterdam to here was OK … except it was on probably the oldest 777 in United’s fleet. The flight wasn’t very full and I’d suspect the airplane on this route has something to do with that. The seats were old and didn’t work very well. The personal TV screens were the tiny ones from more than ten years ago. The power at the seat was the type first introduced by United requiring a special DC adaptor ($29) and a special power supply for the computer. I have the adapter and power supply — at home as I haven’t needed them for years. The headphone connections was the old two-prong type that United invented so that people wouldn’t steal the headsets. The equipment on the airplane was so old that the flight attendants had to do a manual, stand-in-the-aisle safety briefing! I was definitely underwhelmed. However, we did fly safely and fairly smoothly.

We had a good time in Amsterdam. We spent Saturday afternoon walking around downtown and taking a one-hour canal boat tour. We’re getting to know the downtown area quite well. We passed two different Viking River Cruise boats … that’s something we need to do again Real Soon Now! Sunday we took a four hour countryside tour that was also quite interesting. Life is good and we’re here with all our luggage. Next stop: Denver.

We’ve arrived at our hotel in the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. We spent the afternoon walking around downtown Amsterdam and had a delightful time. The feet are very tired and it won’t be much longer before I’ll be in bed. It’s about 5 minutes after 9 p.m.  here in Amsterdam.

I did finally get the pictures to upload correctly. It didn’t work very well from the ship. The connection kept timing out.  However, we’ve got high-speed internet at the hotel and I’ve been able to properly link up the pictures. There are ten of them … one from each port of call during the cruise.

It’s a little after 11 p.m. on the last night of the cruise. I’m just about out of minutes on my internet plan. Nina has quite a few minutes left so I may use some of hers to get some pictures posted. The suitcases are packed and will be put outside in the hallway after we get back to the room. We’ll have breakfast about 7:30 a.m. and then wait for our number to be called. At that time the cruise is officially over.

We’ve got two nights in the Hilton Hotel at the Amsterdam Schipol Airport. I think we’ll find someplace in downtown Amsterdam for dinner tomorrow night. We should have high-speed internet at the hotel and can begin catching up on what’s been happening in the world. I can’t imagine much has changed for the better.

Today was a sea day. We spent the entire day sailing towards Rotterdam where we’ll dock about 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. So I slept all the way until 8:30 a.m. this morning. We had a leasurely breakfast. I finished reading my paperback book and put it on the paperback exchange shelf for someone else to read if they wish. Most of the paperbacks on the shelf are romances. I think the only science fiction one on the shelf is the one I put there. I paid my last visit to the hot tub while Nina did some swimming. We had a nice dinner and even bought a couple of pictures (mother … your picture is in the suitcase!). We decided not to go to the show tonight but rather sit out on the veranda and watch the oil drilling platforms go by as we sailed through the North Sea Oil Field. Those are the rigs the make Norway’s Gross Domestic Product per resident the highest in the world at about $54,000 (the US is quite a bit further back at $38,000). These oil rigs are huge. And, I’m over two thousand pictures for the trip. I’m sure glad they’re digital and don’t have any cost associated with them! There were quite a few people on our tours that were still shooting film. I’m sure they sill spend enough money on film and processing to pay for a digital camera.

We’re already starting to plot our next cruise…. Meanwhile I’ve posted a very few pictures in the Picture Album.

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!

The Internet has been quite intermittent on this cruise. This far north just about anything blocks the view to the satellite causing a service interruption. On the other hand, my Blackberry has had almost constant connection! I think I need to get me a GPRS card to go in my laptop computer the next time I’m out travelling in the world. The data connection speed on that card is probably better than over the satellite and I expect that the cost is less than $0.40 a minute! We’re never so far away from the shore that if there is cell phone service at the shore, there’s service here on the ship. That’s a good lesson learned that I’ll try to pass along to other people.

We’ve had another set of delightful days. After leaving HonningsvÃ¥g, we cruised south for a full day and a night and we’ve spent the day in Trondheim, Norway today. Our tour was a long bus ride up into the mountains, a walk through an old copper mine, a forty-minute train ride on a train that’s now part of a museum, and a bus ride back to the ship along the Trondheim Fjord. The copper mine played out about ten years ago after more than 300 years of mining copper ore. The mine played a significant role for Norway during World War II. Prior to the war, Germany was the main consumer of the copper ore from the mine and in early 1940 one of the first prizes Germany siezed in their conquest of Norway was the copper mine. The Allies were determined to stop the production, but the only way to do so was to put the train out of commission that transported the ore down to the ships docked in Trondheim at the end of the fjord. Because of the significant civilian population in Trondheim, bombing the harbor and the ships was ruled out. Initially sabateurs were sent in clandestinely to take out the railroad, which was successfully done in 1941 and again in 1942 when the rail line was repaired. After being repaired a second time the Allies were now within bombing range. The two sons of the man running the mine (who was considered to be a very cruel and harsh taskmaster), had fled Norway with the invasion and then trained with the Royal Brittish Airforce. They conducted two successful bombing raids taking out the rail line as well as all the locomotives. As they were flying back after the second raid, one of the sons was shot down and killed. As a result, Germany got very little copper ore out of this mine during the war.

The food on this ship is very good. Tonight was the Chef’s Surprise and consisted of specialties from the Holland America head chef. He’s pretty good! I’m sure I gained at least three pounds tonight. So, after dinner we went upstairs to the pool and hot tub. We had the area almost completely to ourselves. So the net gain is probably two pounds and fifteen ounces….

Tromso, Norway — a city of northermosts. Today we saw the northernmost university and the northernmost brewery. The day was chilly, windy, and showery. The town is actually quite large with some 63,000 people. The tour we took was about three hours long and drove past the university, the hospital, over to the big Lutheran Church, a few minutes of shopping, and then up to the museum. There aren’t a lot of highlights of the day, but some parts were interesting.

Our tour guide was Finnish going to college here in Tromso. She spoke very good English and was fairly informative. However, she’s only been here for six months so she really doesn’t have a real background in the city. At the museum I saw an advertisement for tour guides for the various cruise ships and tourist busses that will come through this summer. The wages were advertised at 190 kroner per hours, which is about $31 per hour in dollars. So she got paid about $90 plus tips for her service this morning. I can see why the college studens like this work.

The university in Tromso has a medical school connected with a very large hospital. The university also runs the museum and the people working there for the most part seemed to be students. I bought a wooden top at the museum store and the fellow checking me out was studying the clarinet in the school of music. Nina bought a book and the young lady at the check stand was working on her masters degree in “Peace and Conflict Resolution”. That would be a discipline I would expect to find in Norway. I wished her a lot of luck and took her picture (which may at some future time show up in the picture album). Perhaps she’ll be successful and I could then say, “I knew her when…”.

All of the elevators in this ship have carpets on the floor with the day of the week. I think that is a real convenience! I’m not sure I would know what day of the week it was otherwise. It’s just another customer service provided by Holland America! So, Saturday means I should be taking it easy. I shall do that … sometime.

The next morning we arrived in HonningsvÃ¥g. There should be a little circle above the ‘a’. Maybe I’ve found the right symbol (alt-229)? It’s chilly and blustery (of course). Our tour to the North Cape (the northernmost point in Europe) is at 1:30 p.m. so we’ve taken a short walk around town. Not much to see because it’s Sunday and everything is closed (as it should be). I don’t know if we’ve got internet service here. I expect not because we’re surrounded by mountains and the satellite is most likely blocked.

The North Cape (also called North Point) was very interesting. It was fun to be at the northern-most point in Europe. The wind was blowing, rain showers passed by, and it was just like I expected that far north. It’s now Monday and another sea day. We’re headed southwest to Trondheim where we’ll dock tomorrow morning. Life continues to be very good.