When Steve wakes up at 5:30, our ship is steaming up the fjord. It’s a beautiful morning, and the views we see remind us of Casco Bay, Maine, only on a much, much larger scale.
We arrive at the dock around 6:45, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Being on time at this port is critical because it is the end of the cruise. We know this sounds confusing. We are staying aboard for “another cruise” of 18 days. Another 120 or so others are also staying on. But 440 are leaving, and another 440 or so are joining for the cruise that will commence at 6pm when we will set sail for a 108-nautical-mile journey to Kristiansund, Norway.
Our daily Currents newsletter notifies us that the ship has traveled 3,728 nautical miles since we left Reykjavik, Iceland two weeks ago. We crossed two time zone heading east (aka, we gained two hours) and four time zones heading west (aka, we lost four hours). But who’s counting.
It’s another gorgeous day, and we will have the opportunity to poke around Oslo all day. Because this is a disembarkation day, the GDR opens at 6:30. We take advantage of that and show up there shortly after 7:00. It’s very quiet. No doubt, the passengers that are leaving are dealing with last-minute details, and most of them will end up in the madness that is the Terrace Café buffet.
We are both admittedly exhausted. After breakfast, Steve even takes a one-hour nap and Cathy reads. Around 8:30, we head for Horizons to spend a couple of hours looking out at the harbor. What we see is an enormous port bristling with activity. There is already one gigantic cruise ship in port, and another arrives by 9:30. One equally impressively-sized overnight ferry follows it in the next few minutes, followed by another that is evidently plies the water between Copenhagen, Denmark and Oslo. This one docks right in front of us and we have an opportunity to watch it unload dozens and dozens of cars and at least fifteen tractor-trailers .
Every time we look up, we see ferries crisscrossing the bays Two of them are high-speed and must be doing at least 30 knots/hour. This is one very busy city!
An announcement is made at around 10:30 by the captain that brings great cheer to everyone. He announces that, as of right now, wearing masks is optional for crew members.
Steve bangs away on his laptop and Cathy reads. She finishes her book and heads to the library for more. She comes back with three more, all of which she will no doubt read by the end of this cruise and probably way before. Around 11;30, figuring that Waves will be packed with new arrivals looking for lunch (and a place to pass the time until their staterooms are ready), we head there.
It’s practically empty. I guess we don’t exactly have the disembarkation/embarkation ship routine down pat, do we? Well, the weather is great – high 50s and sunny. We eat and chat with Septian, one of the wait staff, that is from Indonesia. He is four months into his six-month contract.
As we’ve said to each other more than once, we have always found the staff members on these Oceania cruises more interesting than our fellow guests. They’re from all over the world and have an interesting range of backgrounds. Our fellow guests, on the other hand, seem to not have anything to talk about except 1) what other cruises they’ve been on, 2) what other countries they have been, or 3) what they don’t like about some minor aspect of the cruise they’re on. It has been our experience that almost none of them ever talk about what else they’ve done for the past umpteenine years, whether they have children or grandchildren, and even what the heck else they do with their lives if they aren’t on this boat. Well, enough of my own grousing. Steve spends the afternoon editing photos and then trying in vain to upload photos to the blog website. As mentioned ad nauseum in previous posts, the internet on the ship is slow. Today it just will not allow him to load anything. Part of the reason is that this is a transition day. The other reason must be that when a person arrives on board, he/she absolutely must immediately sign up for the free internet service and go online to check email. Oh well. Things will get better.
In looking over this post, we see that we failed to make note that around 10:30 this morning, Steve and Cathy make a decision to not do anything in Oslo. Cathy is really tired and Steve wants to get caught up with the blog. This certainly will disqualify us from the Always Anxious To See New Places And Experience New Things Club, but so be it.
Cathy does indeed take a long, healthy and much needed nap. Steve writes and researches information for the post on Stavanger, Norway and Skagen, Denmark, the two previous ports. We go to dinner at … where else? … the Grand Dining Room.
Here is a map and itinerary for our 18-day cruise that begins at 6pm today and ends at 8am on September 17th.
Tomorrow our excursion in Kristiansand begins at 7:15am. So we’re off to a fast start for this cruise, which, by the way, is called North Cape Connoisseur (only the real estate industry can write with more hyperbole than cruise line marketing departments!).
