And Now the Photography—My Top Ten

by | Dec 28, 2024 | Photography

I admit it. I have more than ten photos. But I just could not make up my mind. First, I sorted about 3,000 photos to find my favorites. Then, I broke them down and consulted my wonderful bride and my grandson. Both gave me some good advice. I got down to 28. Six of those were puffin photos from the Isle of Lunga in Scotland. One was easy because it was one of a kind, but the others were really good. Kathleen liked one to add to the top ten and Mason another, so with that, I give you my puffins.

A special note (and I will only say it once, I promise): Don’t forget that if you click the first shot, you can scroll through it with your arrow keys or by swiping. And please don’t look at my photography on a phone.

 

And now for the honorable mentions that aren’t puffins. I will put the locations I shot them in the captions. Again, please click the first one and view them in full-screen mode.

This brings us to the Top Ten. Let’s count down to #1. I have set them up as a single photo gallery, so you can click them to view them full-screen.

Number 10—Djupevatn Lake above the town of Gearanger in Norway. I did a quick pano to get the full wide angle. I heard from someone who was on the cruise before ours and, therefore, had visited this lake two weeks before us. They told me it was still frozen over with tons of snow. You really need to click this one to see it in full-screen mode.

Number 9—Eileen Donan in Dornie Scotland from above. This is Kathleen’s family castle. You see, her mother’s maiden name was McCray, and this is the ancestral home of the McCrays. You may recognize it because it has been in many films and is commonly known as one of the most photogenic castles in all of Scotland. I took a ton of photos of it from ground level, but I knew there was a way to get a shot of it from above. As we were leaving the grounds, I asked one of the parking attendants how to get to the ridge above the castle. He swore me to secrecy and gave me exceptional directions that enabled me to get this shot.

Number 8—Lisbon below the Hotel Portugal. We were having our last dinner with our good friends we travel with every October (Steve, Jamie, Mike & Cathy) in a restaurant on top of a nearby hotel when I took this shot of an open-air market about a block from our hotel. It isn’t often that I get two almost aerial shots in one year.

Number Seven—A political demonstration in Lisbon. I don’t think I have ever taken a newsworthy photo before. Something that covers the news that is happening wherever we are. I was walking back from Lisbon’s Pink Street when I crossed a bridge and saw this march below me. It was so unusual for me that I had to include it in my Top Ten.

Number Six—The Tulip Stairs in the Queen’s Castle Greenwich, England. This beautiful photo is all about the angle. I took about 20 shots of this staircase, but the best of them was looking up its spiral.

Number 5—A pastoral scene just outside Plockton, Scotland. We were driving down a very remote but beautiful road headed to Plockton, Scotland, where we were looking for highland coos. We had seen a YouTube video that there were coos in Plockton (if you don’t know what a highland coo is, wait until my number one photo shows up). But there were no coos. But there was a cow on the other side of the bridge over a creek that just grabbed me as I glimpsed it while driving by. Seriously, I had to jam on the brakes (thankfully, no cars within a mile or so) and back up until I could line up the shot. This shot has grown on me since so many people who have seen it told me they really liked it.

Number 4—Incredible Glencoe in Scotland. Besides being the scene of a terrible massacre of Scottish families by British soldiers in 1692, Glencoe is maybe the most beautiful place I have ever seen. As we were driving from Fort William back to Glasgow, we had two routes we could have taken. One was the quickest and easiest, but we had driven up that way a few days earlier. The other way was longer and went through Glencoe. We were tired from our week in the Highlands, but at the last minute, we decided to do Glencoe. On that route, there is a stretch of road with pull-outs for photographers like me to jump out of their cars and shoot the glorious scenery. I think I stopped at all of them. And the weather cooperated with an amazing combination of sun, clouds and blue sky. These mountains are magnificent in every way, and this would have been my number one shot, but like the puffins, I couldn’t decide between the hundreds I took that day. This one is my favorite. One more thing. Please click it to see it full screen—it needs the space to really understand why I love it.

Number 3–Puffins in action on the Isle of Lunga, Scotland. As I mentioned above, when I wrote about my puffin experience, I took a TON of photos that day. I want to say the total was in the high hundreds or low thousands. The hardest part was getting a decent shot of them flying. I lay or sat on the ground, focused on a particular area and shot at least 200 shots. In all of those, the flying puffins were either blurry or so fast that I missed them completely. This was also one of those times when I didn’t know what I had until I got back to our Bed and Breakfast that night and could look through the shots. I had no clue if I had that shot I wanted or not. It turns out I did. Out of those hundreds of attempted action shots, this isn’t the best puffin flying shot I got…it is the ONLY puffin flying shot I got, but it’s a good one, and I worked hard to get it.

Number 2—Isle of Staffa, Scotland. This is one of those photos that makes people gasp when they see it: This guy is so high on this cliff. I love it because it teaches me something as a photographer—you need humans for scale. I have two versions of this same exact shot. One with a human and one without. The one without is boring. The one with a human catches your eye and pulls you right in. Also, please note the naturally occurring basalt columns at the bottom of the cliff. That’s the reason that Staffa is so famous. You should see the cave below the cliff—WOW!

Number 1—My favorite Highland Coo on the Isle of Skye. This guy just called out to me. Actually, he is kind of tired of me. I have an entire series of shots of this guy posing, but this is my favorite. After being disappointed in Plockton when we didn’t find any coos, we were driving by a farm on the Isle of Skye with a small herd right near a fence. We pulled over, and I took quite a few shots. Our forever neighbor Lisa thinks it should be framed and hung in our house or maybe in hers. Either way, I agree. I love it, and I love pretty much all Highland Coos. They are glorious creatures.

Please let me know in the comments what you like or how you would have rearranged the order. I love discussion. 

Which brings us to the end of 2024. This will be my last post of a pretty darn good year with lots of travel, lots of memories and lots of photography. 2025 looks interesting but with a little less travel. We have nothing scheduled until July, when we head to Southern Africa to fulfill my one remaining photo milestone—shooting a safari. BUT…In the meantime, I do have a photographic project coming on January 1, but you will just have to wait until that day to find out about it. Thanks for sticking with me all year long. Travel safely.

That’s all, folks   —Porky Pig

 

 

Beautiful but Dangerous Bergen

by | Jun 29, 2024 | Uncategorized

For this post, I am going to tell you about our visit to Bergen right up until it became the worst day of the trip for me. It could have been much worse, but thankfully it wasn’t. We did like the city; I am just not that impressed with some of the populace.

We arrived early on Thursday. Of course, I was awake and took photos out on the deck in front of the Explorer’s Lounge.

Please excuse this editorial interruption, but I want to mention something while I am writing about the beautiful deck in front of the Explorer’s Lounge on deck seven.  About 90% of the photos I have taken while sailing into and out of someplace have been taken from that deck. It is easily accessible to every person on the ship. Anyone can go to the Explorer’s Lounge, open one of two doors and step out onto that deck for a beautiful view ahead of the ship. I point this out because on our former favorite cruise line, Celebrity, in their new E-Class ships, you can’t look forward to where the ship is going UNLESS YOU ARE IN A SUITE.

Our friends who still cruise Celebrity tell us that Viking is so much more expensive. But if I have to choose between a suite on a Celebrity ship in order to have access to the entire ship or our Penthouse verandah on Viking at just about the same price, I choose Viking. Besides treating me like I am in steerage unless I get a suite, Celebrity also gives me a “suite only” restaurant (where I can’t eat with my friends who are not in a suite) and they have all the things about cruise ships that Viking doesn’t (like kids, a casino, art auctions and more).

Viking gives every single person on the ship the exact same thing. Yes, if you get a Viking suite, you can purchase shore excursions and make dining reservations earlier than others. Still, once you are onboard, everyone is like everyone else except for the size of their stateroom. And that’s why we switched. So I could look forward as we sailed into someplace and not be treated like a second-class passenger.

Back to our sail-in. It was a gorgeous day weather-wise, and I had lots of photo opportunities. Here’s my first batch. Don’t worry; there are nowhere near as many photos today as yesterday in my post on Gearanger. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

I just remembered that I should mention that, like many Viking cruises, we were getting an overnight in Bergen before we disembarked on Friday. So today was a touring day. And we were booked on our usual, included “panoramic tour” of Bergen. We met our guide Nikolay on the pier, and we were off on our “luxury motor coach”. Even though Nikolay was from Germany and had only been in Bergen for a year, he did a very competent job. The first stop was downtown, where we could look back on the old port, then a visit to the basement of a church, which had been an old crypt but was now open to everyone for contemplation. Then, it was off to downtown, where we walked about six blocks through some old town area. All the way, Nikolay gave us a very informative talk.

Here are the photos with captions from our “Panoramic Bergen” excursion. Enjoy!

After the tour, just like usual, Kathleen and I were back on the ship for lunch while Steve and Jamie did an E-Bike tour with Viking. They really enjoyed it, so if you have a chance to do it, they endorse it.

After lunch, Kathleen went back to the stateroom to start packing for disembarkation the following day, and I headed back into town for an unexpectedly warm walk in the sunshine. I took lots of photos, so here’s another gallery.

And right after I took that last photo, it happened. My walk through beautiful Bergen took a bad turn when I was assaulted. It started with a young teen riding an electric scooter, passing me very closely while I was walking. He came so close I could feel him before I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I said Roy Kent’s favorite word. For those of you who have no idea who Roy Kent is, he is my favorite character on my favorite television show, Ted Lasso. His favorite word has four letters and starts with F. The kid (who was with another kid) turned and sneered at me, and then they went off down the road and turned a corner.

About five minutes later, I was still walking on the same residential street (looking for cool houses to photograph) when the same kid snuck up behind me again and passed me pretty quickly, but this time, he leaned toward me and pushed me out into the street. Luckily, no cars were coming, but I did take a pretty hard fall. Enough that my watch went off, asking me if I had fallen. Luckily for me, a very nice driver turned the corner just after the teens took off, and he stopped to check if I was OK. I debated calling the police but couldn’t identify the teens; there were no other witnesses, so why bother? Who knows what a pain that would have been to deal with?

I got up with a bruised knee and two bruised hands to go along with some road rash. I saved my camera—no damage, but I will be sore for a few days.

I was about two miles from the ship (on a total five-mile walk), so I got up, wiped off the blood and walked the rest of the way back to the ship. Got some ice on all of the bruises and bumps, left blood stains all over the stateroom (I felt bad about that) and limped around for the next day.

Of all the places I have walked around at crazy times taking pictures over the last 25 years, the last place I would have expected this to happen was Bergen, Norway.  I will be fine (everything except one thumb and the road rash feels a lot better two days later). And it could have been a whole lot worse. I could have broken my camera ?…or something else.

I didn’t want to spoil the cruise’s last night, so I made it up to the World Cafe for a final dinner (and a photo) with Steve, Jamie, Julie, Jamie and Kathleen. Not to mention the head waiter who managed to photo-bomb us. One of his staff members was taking the photo, so he couldn’t tell us what his boss was doing. But his boss was one of the nicest crew members we met all week, so we were OK with that.

Thanks to ice and Aleve, the next morning, I felt well enough to disembark (they wouldn’t give us a free cruise for something that happened in Bergen ?) so we grabbed an Uber and headed to our home for the night, the Moxy Hotel. It was a nice enough hotel, but when I booked it, the website said they were at the top of the port area. Well, Bergen has two (or maybe three) port areas. We wanted to be near where the ship docked in the interesting part of town. Instead we wound up a 2000 Kroner (for those who want to know, that’s about $20—transport is expensive in Bergen) Uber ride away from there (it was only 1.9 miles to walk from the ship to the hotel, but 6.4 miles to drive there due to one-way and pedestrian streets). Better planning next time. Bergen looks small on a map.

The hotel was very nice, but obviously, we were not their demographic. They are looking for 30-50-something tech professionals. Not 70+ retired people. But it was still OK. After we were off the ship (easiest disembarkation ever), at 9:00 a.m., we were at the hotel by 10:00. Of course, we didn’t expect our room to be ready. Check-in was at 3:00 p.m., but the nice person at the front desk said it should be ready by 1:00 or so. Since we knew this was going to happen, we had planned a couple of things to do in the meantime.

First up was the Bergen funicular. We decided to go there first because we had heard that by 10:30 a.m., it was a madhouse. We arrived just before 10:00 and made it up to the top in no time. We didn’t have to wait in line at all. We bought our tickets and jumped on. By the time we came back down around 11:00, the line was halfway down the street. If you go, go early! We took some great pictures while we were up there. Here’s the result.

That about covers our day. We did a little shopping, dodged a terrific rainstorm by having lunch in a nice restaurant, and then returned to the hotel. By that time, we were both just wiped out. We didn’t even go out to dinner. I canceled our reservations, and we just went down to the hotel bar and had a drink and a flatbread. If you ever stay there, know that their flatbread is really flat…it’s a flour tortilla ?. That’s OK, after the last month of eating out everywhere we went, we didn’t need any more food. It was good to skip a meal.

This morning (Saturday, June 29), we headed to the airport early and caught our first flight from Bergen to Copenhagen. It went just fine, but when we got to Copenhagen, we ran into problems. We only had about 70 minutes to change planes for our flight to London, and we figured since we were on the same airline, we would be close. First, our flight was about 15 minutes late getting in, then when we left our arrival gate, the board above the door said it was a 12-minute walk to our gate. They didn’t mention Passport Control (why do you have to go through that just to pass through a country and never leave an airport???) or the fact that the woman directing traffic at Passport Control told us we couldn’t use the ones for our D gate but had to walk past our gate to the E gates and go through Passport Control there…and then come back to our D-Gate inside security. This was not a 12-minute walk. This was about a 25-minute walk.

As we walked towards the E-gate Passport Control, we walked by our gate D-103 and we talked to someone at the gate, but he told us he could not let us in there and that we had to go to Passport Control and return on the upper level. I told them I wasn’t sure Kathleen’s knee could make it that far and back before the flight left. He said he would order us a wheelchair, which would be there in 15 minutes, and that would get us cleared right through. We waited 20 minutes until we could see them boarding our flight at the gate right above us, and we decided to walk it. We finally found the E gates Passport Control, and another couple headed for our flight was there. They helped us get through, and the folks in line were nice enough to let us go to the front of the line. Once through there, we had to hike back to our gate. I went ahead and told Kathleen I would make that plane wait if I had to hijack it ?. Luckily, I didn’t have to go that far, but we were supposed to be in the first group to board, and I think we were about the last people on board. Maybe five got on after us. I chastised the gate agent who had promised us a wheelchair and told him he had almost made us miss the flight.

When we boarded our SAS flight, one of the attendants noticed Kathleen was wearing a knee brace and limping (pretty badly by then), and she immediately got ice for her knee. She was awesome. I mean REALLY AWESOME because while we were in the air, she radioed ahead to Heathrow and had a wheelchair waiting for us. The man who they sent to push the wheelchair was AWESOME as well. He not only got us through Passport Control at Heathrow in about three minutes (the lines looked to be about a 30-minute wait), he helped us with our bags and took us all the way to the Hilton Garden Inn at Terminal 2, where we are spending the night tonight before flying home to Seattle in the morning. That’s where I am sitting, finishing up this post. Part of the day was a bust, but it turned out OK in the end.

That about covers Bergen and the day after. My plan is to sum this all up (the cruise) while we fly home tomorrow. At least, that’s my plan now. It depends on how tired I am. But we don’t fly until noon, and we will be home by 2:45 p.m., so we shall see how much I can get done in two hours and 45 minutes ?. Stick with me; we are almost done. It’s hard to believe we left our house a month ago, on May 30th and will get home tomorrow, June 30th. Home sweet home.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.  —Winston Churchill

 

 

 

Gorgeous Geiranger

by | Jun 28, 2024 | Uncategorized

WARNING! This is a LOOOONNNNGGGG post. Feel free to read it in two or three parts. But there are a lot of beautiful pictures of Norway.

As we were ending our day last night, I told Kathleen that while I still thought Scotland was the most naturally beautiful place in the world, Norway had to be a close second. This has been an amazing trip so far because we have been able to visit both these places and see their incredible beauty. We had been impressed with Norway so far, but when we sailed into Geiranger that went over the top—this place is incredible.

If you have never sailed into or out of Geiranger on the Geiranger fjord, you need to do it. The night before we arrived, our wonderful cruise director André had told us that the sail-in would begin up the fjord at 4:30 a.m. But he reminded everyone that we would also sail out in the afternoon, and it would be much better weather then. Of course, the photographer and writer in me wanted both. So there I was at 4:30 a.m., standing outside the Explorer’s Lounge in the rain, taking pictures.

As any good photographer will tell you if you have a chance to shoot something twice—in a different light—do it! So I did. And I was glad I did because natural beauty comes in many forms, both wet and dry, dark and light and getting to shoot Geiranger fjord was worth getting up early. I am going to shut up now and post the photos of the sail-in, and you can see what I mean. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

A slight problem here. WordPress (the software I use to create this site) won’t let me add more photos to that gallery. So here are more, starting with The Seven Sisters.

One other photo I want you to see so I can reference it later is this one of the village of Geiranger. Pay special note to the waterfall that flows down to the town. If you look closely (you can click the photo to enlarge it), just to the right of the waterfall is a staircase. We were told it has anywhere from 321 to 384 steps. My brother Steve and I climbed it a few hours later—more about that, with photos below.

Our morning was planned for us as we had signed up for the included shore excursion, “Panoramic Geiranger.” So at 9:10 a.m., we piled onto our “luxury motor coach” and were off up the mountain to see the incredible views. Sadly, some of the folks who had the early excursions saw nothing but clouds. Clouds from the bottom, the middle and the top. Which means they basically saw nothing. Those of us with the later excursion had better luck.

Our first stop was a gorgeous alpine lake at the very top of a long set of hairpin-turn switchbacks (which I kept my eyes shut for—pretended to be asleep—don’t tell anyone, but I am afraid of heights). There we were, above the clouds. The photo at the very top of this post is of that lake. There is not a lot else to take photos of at the top—a little gift shop, pay toilets and a restaurant.

Then, it was back down the hill to a spot that overlooked Geiranger. When the “luxury motor coach” first pulled over, we were still socked in with clouds, but by the time we had been there about 10 minutes, it cleared up. YAHOO! Here are a couple of shots I got from this stop.

After this, we went down the switchbacks (I kept my eyes closed again) to the bottom. I breathed a sigh of relief when we got there because I thought we were going back to the ship…but no…we were going up another set of switchbacks that were even worse. And when we got to the top to take pictures, we were in a cloud/fog and couldn’t see a thing. So much for that. Once off the second hill, we were off the “luxury motor coach” and back on Venus for lunch. After lunch, Jamie and Kathleen went back to their respective staterooms to nap, and Steve and I climbed the staircase next to the waterfall. It was an amazing walk, as you can see from my photos. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

After we were back down from the waterfall staircase, Steve and I  did a little shopping (or tried to) and went back to the ship (Geiranger has a cool floating dock that extends into the fjord, and you get to walk off the ship and in to dry land in about five minutes—there’s a picture of it in the slides below.) About an hour later, as we headed up to dinner at the World Cafe, the captain announced we were leaving Geiranger and that the sail-out would be much different than the sail-in early that morning. If you don’t believe him, here are the photos I got as we sailed up the fjord.

That’s about it for Geiranger. As you can tell, it was quite the day. We had every kind of weather you can have (except snow—thankfully), and we got to see the best of the fjords in the best of ways. The next day we would be in Bergen. We had heard amazing things about Bergen but our first day there would turn out to be the worst day (for me) of the entire trip. More soon.

Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea.  —Mikhail Lermontov

Bodø is (kind of) Boring

by | Jun 26, 2024 | Uncategorized

Monday, we woke up sailing into Bodø. The day before, during his daily announcements, the captain warned us that on his last four attempts at mooring at Bodø, they had not been able to dock due to either high winds or waves. The channel that leads into the protective harbor is just about big enough to fit Venus. Anything bigger has to tender, which I think with high winds and waves would not be a good idea.

We were lucky enough to be able to get through the tiny break in the sea wall and dock. But then what? What is there to do in Bodø? The answer is…not much. There was one included excursion, and that was a three-minute ride in a “luxury motor coach” to the Bodø Aviation Museum, where you were dropped off for three hours before your bus was back to return you to the ship. Kathleen and I had already decided to skip it. In Seattle, we have a place called the Boeing Museum of Flight. While the others who went told us they had an actual U-2 spy plane and an old cargo plane you could walk through as long as someone wasn’t hogging it, we countered with our Museum of Flight, where you can walk through Air Force One that LBJ was sworn in on and flew JFK’s body home from Dallas, the Concorde, a Space Shuttle simulator, the first Boeing 747 ever built and a lot more. We seem to go there every couple of years with the grandkids. So we decided to stay on board so Kathleen could do laundry, nurse her cold a little, and I could get my post on Tromsø finished.

I do need to mention that sailing into the port was kind of cool, and I got lucky and saw it coming. Kathleen was getting dressed, and I was looking out our stateroom window when I saw some men dressed as 17th-century Norwegian soldiers firing a cannon and making a general noise to welcome us into the harbor. I have that and some other photos from the sail-in for you right here. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Did I mention the weather was terrible? We had rain on and off since we sailed in, so after I worked on my Tromsø post for a while and got it online with all those photos, we had lunch. The rain had stopped for a short time, so I decided to go out and take a walk and some photos to see what I could discover about Bodø and why Viking chose to make this a port stop.

One of the first things I realized is that Bodø does not get many cruise ships. I could tell this from two indicators. First, as I left the ship, we were moored on a reasonably busy road. In the first five minutes, I was off the ship, I saw at least six cars pull over on this busy road so the drivers could get out and take a photo of the ship. Some took multiple photos and selfies with the ship in the background.

As I walked, I saw the second indicator that they don’t get too many cruise ship visits—there was not a single souvenir store anywhere near the port. Not one. There were no magnets, postcards, tee shirts, troll statues or anything else. It’s like they were not expecting us (not that I need a souvenir shop). No wonder the soldiers at the fort were so excited. Maybe they had never seen a cruise ship before. But if Bodø is going to attract more ships, they will have to find more things for those people to do.

That said, I had a nice walk and took a bunch of pics of the harbor, and here they are:

That was about it. I did take a couple of more photos of Kathleen on our verandah (while I was off the ship). We do this just about every cruise to see where our stateroom is from the outside. Here’s a four-stateroom zoom-in.

That about covered our day in Bodø. It was relaxing for us, and those who visited the Aviation Museum said it was “just fine.” They did mention that on the three-minute ride to and from the museum, they would have loved someone to tell them something about Bodø, but there was only the driver, who spoke little English—not a guide on site.

“I want to travel. Maybe I’ll end up living in Norway, making cakes.” – Eva Green

A Long and Beautiful Day in Tromsø

by | Jun 24, 2024 | Uncategorized

Your favorite travel blogger (hopefully, that is me) really cares about you getting the complete travel experience. Since I am currently blogging a cruise called “Into the Midnight Sun.” I thought I better ensure you got a photo of…the midnight sun. And there it is…right above this paragraph. Before we went to bed on Saturday night (after leaving Honningsvåg), I set a silent alarm on my watch to wake up at midnight. When it went off, I checked outside our stateroom window to see if we were clouded over. If we were, I was going back to bed. But no such luck. The sun was up. It’s not high in the sky, but it’s definitely still up.

So I got up, got dressed, went up to the front deck outside the Explorer’s Lounge, and took this shot and one other I like a little more (but this one fits the page better), then I went back to our stateroom, got out of my clothes and went back to bed. But not before setting another silent alarm for 5:00 a.m. because that was when the Captain had said we would be sailing into the beautiful area that leads to Tromsø. Was he ever right? I have taken around 300-400 photos on almost every other day of the cruise. Between midnight and 9:30 Saturday night, when I went to bed, I shot 1,131 photos. Don’t worry; I am not going to make you look at all of them. I have reduced the total to around 85 and will break it up into smaller groups. I wish there weren’t so many, but I could not cover the city and the beautiful weather without them.

So here’s the first batch from our sail-in. The day was remarkable. The weather was incredible. I will try to put captions on all of them, but some need no explanation. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

The sail-in went on for quite a while. The captain had said in his noon announcement the day before that we would cross under the Tromsø bridge at approximately 6:00 a.m., and he was right. We did. Here are the photos of that crossing.

Tromsø is on an island. As we approached the island, there are two bridges, and the harbor was on the other side of both of them. Unfortunately, a ship the size of Viking Venus can’t fit under the older bridge, so we went under the new bridge and then had to sail all the way around the island to get to the port almost underneath the lower and older bridge. But that was OK with me because it provided me with even more photographic subjects.

After we docked, it was time for our (you guessed it) our “luxury motor coach” panoramic tour of Tromsø. This would be one of the best we have had. We jumped on the bus with our guide, Mirko Maiutto (sounds Italian to me), and we were off to the University in Tromsø (the Fighting Ravens), where we stopped for 40 minutes or so to watch a movie in their planetarium. Usually, this would have put me to sleep, but this one was about the aurora borealis, and we loved it. It was made by a local Tromsø filmmaker, and he did an outstanding job; their planetarium is very cool, with wonderful seats.

After that, it was time to tour the rest of the islands. Mirko was an excellent guide, and we learned a lot. You will have to read the captions on the photos to see what we did. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

After our tour with Mirko, we had some lunch, and I headed out for a long walk. I toured the harbor area, found the start of the old bridge and decided to walk across to the Arctic Cathedral to get some close-ups. Then, I walked back to the downtown area to get a closer look at some of the things we had seen on our panoramic “luxury motor coach” tour. It turned into a two-hour, six-mile walk, but the weather was so beautiful it barely felt like it. Here are the shots I got on that walk. Enjoy.

Sadly, I took several beautiful panoramic shots in Tromsø. Still, after combining them in Photoshop (one of my panoramic shots is usually composed of more than ten individual photos stitched together), they are just too large to upload with the current internet connection. The one at the top of this page is just one of the nine I wish I could include in this post.

That about does it for Tromsø. As you can see, it was a BEAUTIFUL day, and we had a wonderful time. Tomorrow, I will tell you all about the city of Bodø. The only hiccup this week is that Kathleen has now caught a cold. She keeps telling me it’s not my cold she caught because it has been too long since I had it, but at least I am over mine and can fully empathize with her.

Adventure is just bad planning.  —Roald Amundsen