Steve and Cathy's Blog

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. Boathouse of one of the many marinas Look at all those sailboats! 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

The map at the beginning of this post is of the country of Denmark. If you look carefully at the narrow peninsula at the very Northern tip of the country, that is where Skagen is located. The pronunciation of the town is Skain, as in plain, by the way. We arrive at this most interesting community at 10am. Our excursion isn’t until 2:10pm, so we are determined to take advantage of the mid-afternoon time of our

We arrive in port at 9am and dock right next to some office buildings pretty close to the center of town. We have not signed up for any excursions here, but intend to walk through the town center. We do have two sightseeing goals: the Stavanger Maritme Museum and, believe it nor not, the Iddis Canning Museum. Having lunch in the city is also on our agenda, but, because it’s Sunday, we aren’t sure about those possibilities. We disembark and

We see the headlands of the Shetlands half an hour before we dock at 8:00am in Lerwick, and the scenery is as beautiful as we remember from our 2019 visit here. An enormous ferry follows us into port and docks across the way. We learn that it makes an 12-13 hour overnight trip connecting the Shetland Islands with the city of Aberdeen on the northwest coast of Scotland – a distance of approximately 200 miles. Our

Steve awakens at 6:00am and begins uploading photos to the blog app, and gets a sense that the ship isn’t moving but is so wrapped up in cursing the glacial pace of the uploading chore that he doesn’t look out until 7am. And lo and behold, we are docked! Around 8, Cathy arises. Shortly thereafter, while we are watching the “Sirena Today Show” with Cruise Director Julie James, the captain come on the public address system.

Obviously, there are no landscape photo opportunities when we are at sea. Having said that, the sky dominates the scene, and cloud formations at sea can be stunning. We are including some we took these last two days. We left Qaqortoq at 8pm on the 22nd at 8pm. Our destination, Torshavn in the Faroe Islands, is 1,070 nautical miles, which converts to 1,231 statute miles. We are heading east, of course, and will pass south of Iceland

Steve wakes up at 4am and decides that this is a good time to overcome the slow internet problem. All the photos he wants to put in his blog have to be uploaded to the WordPress website. During the day, this can often be a painfully slow process because everyone else is online then. Early morning hours should be better. And they are! By 5:30am, he is almost all caught up putting them in the media

We had spent the morning on our normal shipboard pursuits: Cathy went to the library; Steve wrote in the blog. Steve had finally gotten back to doing some exercise: a half hour of very brisk walking around the pool deck (the fitness track being closed because of windy conditions and the track being wet from the heavy fog we were traveling through). Temperature is 39 degrees. We’re almost to Qaqortok Anchor at Noon. We eat at

We awaken around 5:30am and soon find ourselves looking at Nuuk, Greenland as our ship sails in for our scheduled 7:00am arrival. Already we are making observations that surprise us. In particular, we see dozens and dozens of apartment buildings, certainly something we didn’t expect in Greenland. This tells us already that today is going to be an education, a day when our preconceptions are challenged. That’s what travel is all about, and makes us even

The photo above was taken from a website. It is courtesy of the Danish Foreign Ministry and is of uncertain vintage. We wake up to dense fog and choppy seas. We are due in to Paamiut, Greenland at 10am. We are scheduled for the “Walking Tour of Paamiut,” which is pretty much what is available. Oceania is very careful to note that the excursions in Greenland won’t be led by a professional guide but a resident