Steve and Cathy's Blog

Above is a picture of Cathy in her very favorite part of the ship – the Library. Doesn’t she look at home there? Breakfast in the Grand dining Room, where we had an opportunity to chat with Dining Room Manager Gorica (pronounced Gor eetz’ ah – she’s from Serbia). She has become a friend that we look forward to seeing every day, and we certainly do see her daily because she is everywhere doing whatever it takes to

We have been hoping to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights ever since this cruise began. As good as our luck with the weather has been, an opportunity to do so has eluded us …. until tonight. As the weather forecast this evening has been positive that the clouds would not be there to interfere, Steve ventures up to Deck 11 to join at least 75 fellow passengers to see if our patience will be

Today’s post is going to contain a lot of photos, and it would not be doing the scenery we see justice if we reduce the photos in size to where a reader can’t appreciate what we saw. Please forgive us for crowding this post with so many large photos. It’s a beautiful sail into Leknes, Norway where the cruise dock is located. The ship docks at 10:00am, the same time as we meet in Sirena Lounge

Fortunately, Steve is up early to upload photos, and has the chance to take some pictures of Sirena’s entry into Tromso. As can be seen from the map above, the city itself is actually situated on an island, and there are several fjords by which to reach the city from the Norwegian Sea. We approach from the northeast, and we spend over two hours traveling down one of them until we arrive at the scheduled time

Sirena docks at 7am at the one cruise dock in town. Our tour starts at 8:15 today, so we eat breakfast at the Terrace Café. Our good weather karma is apparently taking a couple of days off. It’s cold, damp and windy. We are taking a bus trip to Nord Kapp, or North Cape in the English language.  Since our visit will be completely out of town, here’s just a brief Wikipedia intro to Honningsvag: “ …the northernmost

Steve is up at 4:30am specifically so he can submit a couple of posts and upload photos on to the blog site. As mentioned before, this is a bit bandwidth intensive, so doing it at this time of day is the only semi-efficient way to do it – and it doesn’t slow up the internet for everyone else trying to use it.  He’s done at 6:00, so then decides to get in a walk on the

1:30pm Sirena is heading northeast and will pass the Lofoten archipelago today enroute to Hammerfest, Norway. We will be back to Leknes, one of Lofoten’s two towns, on the 7th of September. We welcome this Sea Day as a time to relax and perhaps catch up on things. The morning is spent in Horizons, right in the bow. The sea is active, but the ship is handling it well. The captain’s message at noon updates us

View of Sirena from Innlandet We have been lucky enough to have visited Kristiansund in 2019, but the excursion we took then took us way out into the countryside The excursion we have today is the opposite as it’s entirely in the city, which is comprised of four islands, as this sign for the ferry shows. We will visit two of them using this ferry. Sirena docks at 7:00am right in the center of town. For

We spend most of the morning cruising the North Sea about 20 miles off the Norwegian shore. The skies continue to provide ever-changing, interesting vistas, and Steve cannot resist photographing them. 6:46am 7:51am 8:37am: Doesn’t this island resemble a whale? Our morning routine is firmly in place. At 10:30am, the ship enters the fjord that takes us to the island of Vågsøy, on which the town of Måløy is located. It’s a beautiful ride of about

Our ship docks on schedule at 7am. We have been up since 5:00am because our excursion, Lillesand By Land & Sea, begins at 7:15am and will last until almost noon. We are at a cruise pier, but docked right across from part of the container port, so it’s hard to get our bearings.  We are led off the ship, and wander through a building and find our bus. Our guide Eva, whose is pictured above, is