2025 Norway and British Isles

 Our tour today was a walking tour of Alesund.  The weather was absolutely perfect with temperatures in the low 60s and no wind.  A light jacket was all that was needed, and even that came off during parts of the tour.   Alesund, like so many other cities, burned to the ground in 1904.  Of the 12,000 inhabitants, 10,000 lost everything but only 2 died, which was miraculous since it started during the night and went on for 15 hours.  Afterwards, the central area was rebuilt with brick or plaster exteriors and wider streets.  Most of the new buildings were in the Norwegian art nouveau style, which included interesting decorations and asymmetry. Cute and practical signage. These flower "pots" were all over the city. Typical of the asymmetric style with different-shaped windows on each level, different materials (stone and plaster), and even different rooflines on the same building. This was built by the local pharmacist and is now a museum.  The...

This post is late due to user error with the wifi.  We had to change satellites which meant signing in again to our shipboard account.  I had trouble doing that until Gustav in the internet help desk showed me the correct way to do it again.  Sigh... Vik is a small town loctated along the Sognefjord. It was a beautiful sail in again. The weather has been cooperative so far. It was a bit cloudy but only way up high so we could see the tops of the mountains. Sailing along you start to think, oh yes, those are pretty tall hills. And then you look at the tiny little houses along the waterline and realize, no those are really big mountains. There has been only a bit of snow visible way up at the top, but the rest is almost all green. We didn’t have a tour here, so we let the morning tours go ahead since this was a tendering port. We headed in just after lunch and had a bit of a walk around. It took only an hour to see most everything. We elected not to walk all the w...