Monday 16th July - Bergen

I awoke at 4:45 am and noticed how light it looked. Today we were to harbour at Bergen. The sky was covered by a thick layer of cloud. We appeared to be moving as the sea was rushing past us. A tanker could be spotted through the gloom on the horizon heading with speed in same direction as the sea. It was very soon out of sight as it passed my letterbox view. Their was a sliver of cloud in the sky that was very light. the sky was so deep in cloud with this one short strip of light giving me hope of a brighter day to come. How different from yesterday which for the most part was quite bright and some cloud. Really chilly for July.

It was too difficult to judge the temperature on this bleak morning in mid July, but it did not look inviting enough to test it by opening the balcony door.

Hopefully today we will see the advantage of paying the extra for a balcony cabin. So far as the weather has been so cool we had not used it much. Plus it is not of a size where the six of us could sit. the other disadvantage is if your neighbours smoke which seems to be a big problem, then you just don't want to sit there at all. Smoking should be banned on one side of the ship. this would keep it free for us non smokers.

At 6am we started passing land and we knew we were getting somewhere. I opened the balcony door to take a couple of pictures showing the bleak overcast sky and soon shut it again. my it was cool.

Around 7am we took ourselves onto deck 7 and took many pictures as we passed through the waters to our docking harbour. We had a breakfast and by 8:30 am were back in our cabin looking over the harbour port side.

I must say that Bergen did not look at all inviting. the sun was trying to break through and we heard that the highest temp expected would be 16 Celsius

I was feeling worn out and needed to rest. the others went by bus into Bergen and said it was very nice.

When they returned we went to lunch and afterwards we went to the cinema and watched the film "we bought a zoo". Very good family fun.

Soon was dinner time and after we tried for a show but due to a lack of seats only Roger and Linda were able to see it. We all sat and listened to Peter and his band until we all parted in our various directions.

We had noted that the rock like islands on our departure from Bergen seem to be made of volcanic rock. so at sometime in the history of the world there must have been quite a bit of volcanic activity in this area.

( I will say this about the cinema/Malabar (bar) . The sound was awful. The back ground music was so laud and the talking was softer. Real mess up. They used This bar also for shows. The problem we found was the sound was much too laud. We had to leave in one show. Other shows we attended there we sat as far away from the stage as possible. But still sometimes we had to put our fingers in our ears. We noted that others felt the same and many left during permanences. During afternoon films we sat with our finger in our ear during the music bits. Really it gave a head ache and we could not go every day.)