Steve and Cathy's Blog

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

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