Today is a “Sea Day” meaning that we’ll be sailing throughout the day with no port of call until tomorrow. These are some of my favorite cruising days. Breakfast at 8:00 followed by doing some laundry. A lecture at 11:15 on Scandanavia that was quite interesting. Lunch at noon. A question and answer session at 2:15 p.m. talked about life as a crew member on board the ship. I’m now catching up on some email and fixing some things on a couple of weblogs (Jaelene: You can now post pictures). We’ll have dinner at 6:15 followed by a show. Tomorrow we’ll be in Tromso and the tourist will kick back in again. It’s been a very nice day.

This is actually the second time I’ve written this post (or at least on somewhat like it). Because of the cost of Internet time (forty cents a minute), I write my stuff off line and then log in and post it. I had written some of the best prose of my life and saved it. I also needed to write a couple of emails. So, I wrote them and saved them … on top of the blog entry. So all of that profoundly moving entry is gone into bit-bucket heaven. It really was good stuff!

The lecture guy said that his contract allowed him to bring a guest … and that was his wife (otherwise, according to her, he wouldn’t be here). I thought that I could easily do as good a job, if not better, than he did. I need to find out how people get these gigs! Free or highly reduced cost cruising would be very interesting. During the Q&A session there was a couple of questions about social life and shipboard romance. We learned that the Cruise Director is married to the Food and Beverage manager. The Hotel Manager is married to the Cruise Consultant woman. Several others of the crew have their spouses aboard. Those that don’t are allowed to bring their families aboard for up to two months at a time. Their contracts are for six months followed by a two-month leave and then back aboard for six months. That was quite interesting.

My next activity after posting this will be to do some research on oil drilling rigs. Norway ranks third in oil exports in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. About 95% of their oil is exported. Norway generates all of their electricity through hydroelectric power plants, some of which are deep inside mountains tapping into huge lakes trapped at the top of the mountains. Literally every town has a waterfall-driven hydroelectric powerplant or two to supply electricity to the local residents. As we cruise northwards oil platforms are visible on the left and the right of the ship from time to time. So how do they work? Are they just for drilling and then move somewhere else to drill again? How does the oil get from the hole they drilled to shore? I expect that there’ll be something about all of this available here in the library on this ship. The library is one of the best (and one of the more popular) places on the ship. Every seat is taken right now. I know it’s one of my favorite places on the ship!

In about an hour we’ll cross the Arctic Circle. That means the sun will not set tonight. It’s partly cloudy outside so maybe we’ll be able to see this phenomenon. If not tonight, then on another night Real Soon Now. I’m enjoying this Sea Day!

Skagen, Denmark was our first port of call and our last stop in Denmark. We had booked a walking tour of the city which turned out to be more of a marathon tour! About two-thirds into the walk which wasn’t very exciting, we bailed out of the tour and walked back through the town and back to the ship. That left enough time to go swimming (the hot tubs for me) before changing into formal wear and going to dinner. Tonight is the first of three formal nights on this cruise. We’re missing the captains reception going on right now. That means a missed opportunity to have our picture taken with the captain of the ship. No shaking hands, mind you, only standing somewhat together while the photographer takes a picture. We’ve already had our picture taken twice today, so that’s enough, I think.

The hand shaking ban has to do with the flu virus that some cruise ships are plagued with. The virus is passed person to person either through direct contact orf by touching something the infected person has very recently touched. At every opportunity there is someone standing around waiting to squirt the passengers’ hands with Purell hand sanitizer. I’m quite satisfied with not getting sick, so they can squirt away as well as not shake hands. Even better is to miss the event all together.

There will be several opportunities to get our picture taken tonight and again on the other two formal nights. We’re hoping to find one good picture out of the lot. We both look pretty good tonight!

Skagen is on the northern most piece of Denmark and at the place where two seas come together. It supposedly has very good light and was the home of a number of artisans late in the 19th century. Today tourism makes up all of the economy of the town. We didn’t leave much money behind, however. I wanted to buy some Sprite at the grocery store, but they didn’t have any cans, only 1 1/2 liter bottles. So that was our contribution to the local economy. Now were headed to Stavanger, Norway and will be there about 8 a.m. tomorrow morning.

Continued! I couldn’t get this sent!

The computer satellite connection has been very sporadic. It seems that we’re so far north that any little thing that comes up on the horizon blocks the connection. At this rate we’ll be hard pressed to use up our minutes, I’m afraid. The second stop on our cruise was in Stavenger, Norway. We had a delightful bus tour around the countryside from the seashore up into the mountains. This sure is beautiful country … and it all sits on a granite foundation. On every side are towering granite mountains. There are also trees everywhere. According to our tour guide, all homes are made from wood except the very poor people or fish canneries which are made from stone. She was pretty emphatic about the distinction. She definitely gave us a few quotes which we’ll use over the next few years to remind us of the time we spent learning about how Norway became one kingdom under Harold FairHair. The weather has been cooperative.

The day today was spent in the area of Flam, Norway. What a beautiful, quaint little town. Someone said there were about 500 inhabitants in the town with another thousand or so in the area. We took a train up to the top of the basin surrounding Flam, spent a couple of hours there and came back down. The waterfalls are spectacular. Some video of one of them will definitely end up on YouTube. We have plenty of pictures of hillsides, waterfalls, and houses. Digital cameras are good (you can take lots and lots of pictures) and bad (you can take lots and lots of pictures)! So far I’ve got about 700 pictures that I’ve downloaded from my cameras! A few of them will definitely go away. We’re now cruising back out to the ocean and will be sailing northwards all day tomorrow. We could well be late getting into the next port of call due to an interesting issue today.

The trains in Flam are electric. A woman with a hot cup of coffee sat her cup down to cool off and tipped it over into a switch box for the train on its way up the mountain. The train had to come back down (carefully) and be repaired. That left a group of passengers stranded for quite a while at the top. They were about an hour late getting down, so our departure was delayed from Flam. Further, another 200 passengers were waiting downstream to be picked up after their all-day excursion. We were about an hour and a half late picking them up. Before all of this occurred, the ship was going to have to make an average speed of just over 20 knots (about 23 mph) to arrive on time. The boat is only capable of about 23 knots, so unless there’s a shortcut, we’ll be late. Yet another reason for not drinking coffee….

Catching up is sometimes difficult. I wrote a post while we were flying into Stockholm and thought I would have plenty of time while we were in Copenhagen to write. Spare time was something we didn’t have very much of while we were there … not that we didn’t have enough time, just that there were too many things to spend the time on. So, we’ll try to do some catching up. RIght now it’s Monday evening about 10:10 p.m. and the sun has just set. We’re in the library on the ship where there is wireless internet access available at $0.40 a minute. I bought $100 worth of time (about 2 hours and 30 minutes) and will buy more if needed later in the trip. I’m not sure what kinds of internet cafes we might find available at some of the ports of call. The internet access on the Holland America ships has gotten dramatically better since the first cruise. However, the availability of places to get power has not improved. There’s only a couple of hidden power plugs in this room, probably there for the cleaning people, I’m writing this entry off line. I’ll then log in and post this so I don’t use too many mintues up while I’m just writing. I need to show Nina how to do that as well. She’s in the desk next to me writing an entry in her blog.

We arrived in Stockholm without incident, cleared passport control, and went to our gate. There was no waiting area for the flight! We took a couple of seats in a neighboring cafe and waited for the flight. It went on time and we were in Copenhagen an hour after takeoff. After a very long walk (although not as long as in Brussels), we got to baggage claim. The monitor said that the bags would be up in 20 minutes, which was a true statement. The bags came up, but none of our four suitcases arrived. The baggage helper guy looked up the information and said the bags were here, but that the scanner couldn’t read the bag labels, so they would come up on a neighboring carrosel in about 20 minutes. Sure enough, both of Nina’s bags came up about 15 minutes later. We waited, and waited, then Nina noticed they were on the original carrosel! Happy day. The luggage was all there. We were at the hotel by 11:30 a.m.

The Royal SAS Radisson Hotel is one of the luxury hotels in downtown Copenhagen directly across the street from the main tourist information center, the Hard Rock Cafe, and the famed Tovoli Gardens. When the reservations were made, we were originally going to arrive on Sunday, June 10th. Then it turned out we couldn’t get a flight combination that worked on Frequent Flier miles, so we needed to arrive on the 9th of June.As a result we ended up with two reservations; one from the 9th to the 10th and a second reservation from the 10th to the 11th. I sent the hotel an email asking that they combine the two reservations into one and further asked for early checkin as the hotel’s standard checkin is 2 p.m. I got a nice email back saying that they would take care of the reservation and would put us on the list for early checkin. Nice doesn’t mean helpful, however.

Arriving at the hotel we quickly discovered two things. The reservations were not combined and early checkin is a myth. We would have to wait two and a half hours. We walked around a while, did a little shopping at the Hard Rock Cafe, and then waited in the lobby until I got impatient. Shortly thereafter a room magically became available. This European way of thinking continually amazes me. The policy says 2 p.m. checkin so why would someone want something different?? After getting into the room we crashed for a couple of hours. Then after showers and a change of clothes, we headed out to look around the city.

Copenhagen is different than the other European cities. It’s quite spread out and not very clean. It has a very diverse population. Since the architecture wasn’t very interesting, I spent most of my pictures on people. I took many, many pictures of people. I’ll throw most of them away. I got maybe four really nice pictures and one that I really like. The sun set about 9 p.m. and we finally went back to the hotel around 10. The evening was very pleasant and it was nice to be outside. We both slept the night through and were up in mid-morning on Sunday. After breakfast we waited for our travel companions who arrived right on time. They also didn’t have a room available until 2 p.m. Very strange. We had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, did a litte walking around, and about 1:30 p.m. the hotel found a room. That’s when I discovered that we were locked out of our room. We had only be checked in for one day. We were supposed to have checked out, were being charged a premium because checkout time was noon, and the room had been assigned to someone else. With some difficulty I maintained my temper. After intervention from an assistant manager, we got our room back, the charges were removed, and new keys to the door were issued.

We took a bus tour around the downtown. It was an interesting tour and quite informative. That evening we went over to Tivoli Gardens to find that the Queen of Denmark was coming to a concert there. We lined up and took pictures of the royal party as they arrived. She seems to be quite popular … particularly because the monarchy doesn’t cost the taxpayers anything. We had dinner at a restaurant in the Gardens and headed back to the hotel for an interrupted night’s sleep.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from the Tivoli Gardens. I think perhaps somehow I had gotten the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen associated as being somewhat similar to the English Garden in Munich. That was very wrong. Tivoli Gardens is a kind of a forerunner Disneyland. An entrance fee gets one inside. Then there are restaurants, all kinds of carnival rides, some harking back to those seen at county and state fairs in my youth. I kind of think Cony Island was something like this in its heyday.

Sleep lasted until about 2:30 a.m. Then both of us were awake and tossing and turning. We finally got up, opened the blinds, to discover it was light outside. We took lots of pictures, downloaded our pictures to the computers and went back to bed at 5:30 a.m. We met our friends at 9 for breakfast. Then it was pack back up, check out, and take a taxi to the cruise ship terminal. Our time in Copenhagen came to an end. We’re now on board the Rotterdam … very familiar territory from the previous four cruises on Holland America. We’ve had the life boat drill, dinner, been to the first show, and now at 11 p.m. it’s time to head for bed.

As I write this we are somewhere over the Arctic. We’ve been underway for a little under five hours with close to another three hours left before landing in Stockholm. As I was setting up the computer, one of the flight attendants asked over the PA system if there was a doctor on board. I sincerely hope this isn’t serious! The last time that happened to us, Nina and I were on a flight to Japan. The airplane turned back and landed in Anchorage, Alaska and transferred someone to an ambulance. I’ve no idea what’s out in this part of the world if there was a serious medical problem.

Sleeping is impossible, unfortunately. It’s only 8:30 p.m. in my body’s timezone of Pocatello, Idaho. I think we are the only two people awake in Business Class. Everyone else seems to be sound asleep. The fellow across the aisle from me has been sawing a lot of wood! It’s not loud or annoying, just a steady snore very reminiscent of a saw blade ¦ in and out and in and out.

The sun has come up, so Nina had to put the blind down. It was too bright for inside the cabin which otherwise is quite dark. It’s about 4:30 a.m. in Stockholm. It never got dark, but the sun did go down below the horizon for about 45 minutes. The Business Class cabin is very nice as SAS has configured it. However, the seats do NOT recline flat. So far the only airline I’ve found that does that is Singapore Airlines. It isn’t that hard to have the seat recline flat, I just don’t know why the others don’t do it. It is hard to get comfortable on a slant. The dinner was very good (I had halibut and Nina had stuffed chicken) and wine and cheese play a very important part of the meal service. Even now there’s a kind of a buffet set up at the back of the Business Class cabin with several varieties of wine, fruit, and cheeses available for snacking. The lavatories are quite large and have big windows! There is a kind of a shade that can be pulled up while on the ground. I guess in the air no one can see in anyway.

Getting this far has been somewhat of an adventure. The check-in process in Salt Lake was very fast and efficient. The plane boarded on time and was full. However, seat 16E wouldn’t stay in the upright and locked position. So, they took a standby passenger off and moved the woman in 16E into his seat. Then it turned out we couldn’t fly anyway until the seat was locked upright. So back into the gate we went and a mechanic came on the airplane to lock the seat upright. The passenger who had to get off didn’t get back on, though. I’d think the seat would have been useable locked upright. That put us more than a half-hour late leaving Salt Lake City. The First Officer came on the loudspeaker shortly after we left and said the computer showed that we would be about twenty minutes late, but that they would make up some of that time as we’re flying this bird as fast as she’ll go! This was a United flight, so the Air Traffic Control transmissions are available on channel 9. As we got near Chicago, I listened to that channel and learned that ATC was putting all of the airplanes coming in from the west into a holding pattern about a hundred miles north of Chicago. However, as we made the first turn in the holding pattern, we were released to fly direct to Chicago. We were at the gate fifteen minutes late.

I had checked in online to both the United flight to Chicago and to the SAS flight to Stockholm last night at Heather’s house. When we checked the bags in Salt Lake, the agent said we could go directly to the SAS gate in Chicago. Unfortunately, he had that wrong! The SAS flight to Stockholm left out of the International Terminal which can only be reached by taking the inter-terminal train. We got there to find a huge line of people going into the security area. We got into line and shuffled our way up to where the TSA person checks the boarding pass and ID. The one printed online was not acceptable to her. We had to have boarding passes printed by the agent at the SAS counter and there was no changing her mind. Fortunately, there was no line at the SAS checkin counter (everyone had already checked in! The flight was due to depart in less than 20 minutes). We got the boarding passes and cut to the front of the still-very-long-line. We went through security and found we had about a third-of-a-mile walk to the gate! Further, the few moving walkways were all not working. We got onto the airplane as the last people boarding in Business Class. There were still some people boarding for Economy. We had made it this far. The next stop is Stockholm!

Our hotel in Copenhagen has high-speed internet in the room (at no extra charge), so I expect that I can post this to the blog when we get there. If the rest of this flight goes as scheduled and the flight from Stockholm to Copenhagen is on time, we should be at the hotel about noon Copenhagen time. That would be about 4 a.m. by my Pocatello body clock. Just right for taking a short nap and then going out to find out what’s around the hotel. Our friends from Colorado Springs are taking the same flights tomorrow from Chicago to Stockholm to Copenhagen. However, I’m sure their experience in Chicago will be completely uneventful because they have a five hour layover! Things happen only when the connections are close and the gates are far apart.