Ron and Sally Jo Blog

The Hurtigruten is a cruise, ferry and cargo line of ships beginning in 1893 with a fleet of 14 ships.  We were on the Vesteraalen.  It is a working ship so does not have all the amenities of a cruise line—which suited us just fine.  It has a capacity of 500 passengers but it didn’t seem filled at this time of year.  Local people got on and off along the way.  We pulled out of Bergen about 10:30 pm.

The ship makes 34 stops along the coast—sometimes for 15-30 minutes and sometimes for several hours.  Our first off-ship excursion was in Alesund.  We took an hour walk around the city.  There was a great fire in 1904 when nearly ¾ of the city burned.  Much of it was rebuilt in Art Nouveau style.

Our second excursion off the ship was in Trondheim.  We had a city bus tour which took us to a lookout where we could look out over the city.  Our tour guide had several “normal” Norwegian snacks for us to try while viewing the scenery.  Cheese (flavored with a type of jalapeno) in a tube (good for taking on hikes), “caramel” type topping for bread much like Nutella but caramel flavor, dried fish (on the order of beef jerky), chocolate covered things sort of like rice chex, and a type of soda that everyone agreed was much like cream soda.

We had a tour of the 11^th century Gothic Nidaros Cathedral which was built over the burial site of St Olav, King of Norway.  It is the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world.  Absolutely beautiful inside—quite ornate and wonderful stained-glass windows.  The gargoyles were fun.  No photos inside allowed!  We then walked to a pedestrian bridge over the Nidelva River.  In the evening we made a brief stop in Rorvik.  We got off the boat just for a fast walk through a very small town.

On Day 4 of our journey we crossed the Arctic Circle.  There had been a contest on board for people to guess the exact time of crossing—down to the second.  We crossed at 7:16:01 am.  Neither of us won!  Later in the morning there was a ceremony to honor the winner.  Neptune was there to congratulate the winner.  The prize was the flag that flew at the time we crossed the Circle but then…..they poured ice cubes down the winner’s back and gave a shot of schnapps!!!!  Others could also go through this experience then.  Needless to say, we decided we were cold enough not to have the ice cubes!  People really yelped when the ice went down! The schnapps was said to help warm them up.

We had a 1½ hour walk in the town of Bodo.  Just a “regular” little Norwegian town of 50,000 in the north, capital of Nordland county.  We walked through the main district and discovered a beautiful church.  This church was destroyed in 1940 when the whole city center was bombed.  The new cathedral was built in the 1950’s with a 118 ft tall free-standing clock tower with three bells.

Later that day we had a short stop in Svolvaer where we visited a small World War II museum.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2018 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Norway, Scandanavia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.