Category: Cruise

Today, we wanted to get up early to watch the sail-in to our home port of Boston, past the lighthouse at the entrance to the harbor and the harbor islands. But we were way ahead of schedule, so even setting a alarm for 5:00 AM was not early enough. We awoke to dawn and found our ship already pulling into the Black Falcon Pier.

Time to say goodbye to our stateroom home for the last 18 days and all the daily routines of shipboard life.  It is so nice to be home. As wonderful as vacations are, enough is enough. It’s time to get back to real life. The weather today is Boston at its summer best—beautiful blue skies and low humidity.

We are so much luckier than most of our fellow passengers: they have to deal with taxis, and airport transfers, and where to hide their luggage while they go sightseeing until their flights leave. We simply grab our bags, call Uber, and arrive home in less than an hour.

Thanks for visiting our blog. We hope we have been able to capture a bit of our 2016 adventure to share with you.

Arjan is not feeling well, so it is my turn to write again. We are almost out of our prohibitively expensive internet package on the ship, so we will have to finish the blog after we get home.  Lots of good things to come for our regular readers!

We experienced fog horns again all night.  No matter how sunny or clear during the day, the fog rolls in every time we leave a port and we sail in pea soup until the next port. Better than the other way around…makes paying for a cruise worthwhile!

Halifax is blessed with one of the world’s best natural harbors, and it seemed really grand compared to all the ports we have been visiting lately. Today’s weather in Halifax was cloudy-bright, without a drop of sunshine all day. We have been to Halifax before, and the most interesting shore excursion option was Peggy’s Cove, where my grandparents painted many times, so we opted to stay in town and walk around on our own.

We took our time getting off the ship and then strolled along the very well-developed Halifax Harbourwalk for a couple of miles, passing all kinds of docks and boats and cafes and fast food sheds.

There was a Columbian tall ship in town that arrived after we did, and it was great to see all the sailors in their starched white uniforms exploring the town, too.

After following the Harborwalk for almost an hour, we turned up George Street towards the Halifax Citadel, Halifax’s famous fort on its rise above the port, passing the Grand Parade ground and the 200-year-old town clock on the way.

We were in time to watch the enactors fire the noon gun, a tradition going back to when the fort was actually manned.

It was also great to run into Mackenzie again in his natural habitat, a piper who visited our ship and played for us several times on the sail between St. John’s and Halifax. By now, I have talked to him so many times, it felt like we have become old friends.

Because Arjan didn’t feel well, we cut our day short and returned to the ship early. Arjan visited the ship’s doctor after we got back and got a prescription that should have him feeling as good as new by the time we arrive in Boston on July 20.

During the day, whenever we saw something that might merit more time, we kept telling ourselves we can come back any time, now that we are back on our side of the Atlantic. One was the immigration museum at Pier 21, right next to where we docked, and another the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which our cruise location guide Barbara pointed out as being one of the three best she has ever experienced worldwide.

As we sailed out of Halifax, guess what? We sailed back into the fog!

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

After once again waking up to a cold fog, when we approached St. John’s, Newfoundland, the weather began to clear and we actually had a sunny day, and one of the hottest Newfoundland had had for a long time, according to a local café barista.

St. John’s has a remarkable natural harbor.  Deep and very sheltered, with two high hills standing guard at the harbor’s entrance.  One of those is Signal Hill, where Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless telegraph transmission in 1901.

We docked at noon.  P.J and I had a shore excursion that was supposed to start then but because of a delay by Canadian immigration to clear our ship, we were more than a half hour late getting started.  Although the tour director tried her best, it gave the trip a hurried pace.  We first went to Cape Spear, the most eastern point of North America.  There was a large pod of whales swimming by.  But, alas, we had a schedule to keep.

When we reached Signal Hill, P.J and I decided to leave the tour and hike down to the city, about an hour.  It is one of the most spectacular trails I’ve ever been on.  Starting at the top of the hill, it winds down over the rocks below that jut out into the ocean, with gorgeous views of the jagged Newfoundland coast line.

The perfect summer weather helped a lot.  The trail then turns in towards the harbor along the near virtual rock wall at the harbor’s entrance.  The path is very well engineered, with lots of wooden walkways and bridges over crevasses.  At one point there’s a narrow ledge but a chain along the rock face made that easy too.

We sailed out of the harbor while we were having dinner near the panoramic windows of the dining room.  There we saw humpback whales everywhere!  A few came pretty close to the ship.  The plumes from their blow holes made the ocean look like a geyser basin.  Earlier, at Cape Spear, I had seen several whales breaching, not close by but still impressive.  Our tour leader told us the number of them was enough to make the local news.  The estimate was about 25 whales, but it seemed more to me.

Now it’s Sunday, July 17, an at sea day.  We will be in Halifax, Nova Scotia, tomorrow.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Today we are sailing from Greenland to Newfoundland.  There’s dense fog and occasional rain.  We don’t see sky, we can hardly see water.  We’re just pushing through an oceanic white-out.  So we keep ourselves entertained on the ship.  Today there was a question and answer period in the theater with the captain.  When asked what experience he has navigating in these difficult arctic waters, he flipped, “Well, I took this Internet course last week …”.  Yesterday, when we sailed out of Nanortalik into an intimidating fogbank, a fellow passenger looked at it and mused: “How exciting!  Soon we will see other ships that disappeared hundreds of years ago …”.

We woke up to dense fog in Nanortalik, our second stop on the west coast of Greenland and only about half the size of Qaqortoq.  It was the kind of fog that made everything soaking wet without rain.  It was also pretty chilly (36 F, 2 C).  Again, we had to be transported to shore with a tender.  This time that service was pretty slow because of the fog.  They had to make sure not to run into each other, or to an ice berg, of which there were several in the harbor.  There was a wait of more than an hour to go ashore.  By then the fog had started to lift and it became sunny and warmer and very pleasant for our time on shore.  This time I wandered into the outskirts of town.

When I had left most of the cruise crowd behind, I ran into a woman walking along the shore.  She asked: “Are you from the cruise ship?” and I answered “Isn’t everybody?” to which she responded “Well, I’m not!”  She was a visiting nurse from Denmark, Greenland’s “mother country”.  I had an interesting conversation with her about health care.  She had just helped evacuate one of the residents by helicopter.  (Helicopters come and go all day in both towns).  Nanortalik has a hospital with ten beds.  Overflow patients or more complex problems go to the larger facility in Qaqortoq.  Specialized treatments are flown to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, and on rare occasions to Denmark.  Helicopters are the only ambulances in Greenland.  There are no roads and most towns have no airport, only helipads.

We just left Nanortalik for St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.  The new world!  So far, the ocean has been rather placid, except for our first day on the North Sea.  The captain announced that it may get a little rougher tomorrow, with rain, a stiff breeze, and seas up to eight feet. The ship is really putting on the after burners now, cruising at 21 knots.  Occasionally we see icebergs drifting by.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

We woke up to sunny weather in Qaqortoq, on the west coast of Greenland with over three thousand, mostly Inuit, inhabitants.

No fancy cruise terminal here.  We were ferried from our ship to shore with a tender, a life boat that does double duty in ports that have no docks large enough to support our cruise ship.  Qaqortoq is a colorful village, like most towns in northern climates.  From Norway, to Iceland, to Greenland, houses are typically painted in very bright colors.

I got off the tender and started walking uphill through the back streets.  At the end there was mostly open rock and tundra, with cairns marking the best path up to the top of the hill.  This time I had put on my hiking boots and left most of the cruise ship crowds behind.  There were still about a dozen or so hikers from the cruise ship, but I took a different path up.  At the top of the hill I was treated to panoramic views of nearby inlets, dotted with ice bergs and islands, and spectacular mountains in the background.  Hiking in Greenland, what a treat!

At the end of the day the fog rolled in.  It reminded me of the marine layer in LA.  We sailed out of the harbor and into the fog.  Overnight I heard the ship’s horn through the fog.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Until now Glacier Bay in Alaska was the most impressive place I’ve ever seen, along with Doubtful Sound in New Zealand.  Prins Christian Sund, at the southern tip of Greenland, is now another one of those places and may now actually be the most impressive place I’ve ever seen.  It makes most other places look like Kansas.

There were majestic glaciers coming down from the Greenland Ice Cap.  There were mountain ridges that resembled serrated knives and mountain peaks like spear points.

For my Dutch readers: It reminded me of a landscape Maarten Toonder might have drawn.  I saw hanging glaciers that spawned numerous waterfalls.  In any other setting they would be major attractions but here they were merely interesting details in a much grander context.

And then there were the fantastic looking ice bergs.  I spent much time on the sky deck, the top of the ship and best place from where to appreciate the grandeur.  But I also tracked seven or eight miles running from one end of the ship to the other.  It was tiring but it was difficult to choose a time to go inside because, just when you thought you’d seen it all there was something even more spectacular to behold.

I took more pictures than ever and none of them look like they are able to capture the place; it’s hopeless.

At the beginning of the day the weather was gray and rainy.  But that created the impression of how magnificently forbidding this place can be.  Towards the end of the day the sky broke and the late day sun and clear air created very sharp images.

About one out of three times this cruise must be skipped because of fog, or icebergs blocking the channel.  There were two bergs at the entrance of the narrowest passage but our captain carefully floated our sixty thousand ton ship past them.

There are sometimes helicopters scouting ahead whether the ship can go through.  There was a copter flying past our ship at one point.

Even if the rest of the trip is a failure, today made it all worthwhile.  Nothing else matters.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

We were very fortunate to have had two days with decent weather in Reykjavik.  Today we are at sea in the Denmark Strait, going from Iceland to Greenland.  It is gray and dismal again, but the sea is relatively calm with a moderate long swell that gently rocks the ship back and forth.  P.J’s cold continues to improve and she is no longer queasy from the boat.  Good time to reflect on our last forty days in Europe (I consider Greenland  in North America, although it is politically part of Denmark).

It was interesting reading about the rise of populist and anti-immigrant sentiment, not just Brexit, the reasons for which are a little more complex.  From some media outlets you get the impression that Europe is overrun with Middle Eastern refugees that are either on the dole or plotting their next terrorist attack.

We got a different impression during our travels. We talked to lots of wait and hotel staff, bus and taxi drivers.  Most were not from the country they were living in.  There was the Polish car rental agent in Edinburgh.  Although happy to be working in Scotland, he found the Scots to be spoiled and taking their government benefits for granted. There was the young waitress from Saskatchewan who was just ecstatic to be living and working in Pitlochry, Scotland.  Her colleague from Estonia was equally nice and spoke very good English.  There was the third generation Turkish taxi driver who took great pride in being a Berliner.  There was the Dutch hotel desk clerk in Berlin, who detected my Dutch accent.  She spoke perfect German, Dutch and English, and probably more.  There was a nice waiter in the Oxymoron restaurant in Berlin (forgot where he was originally from).  There was a waitress in an Icelandic restaurant, who was originally from Chicago, had married an Icelander and had now been in Iceland for nine years.  She learned Icelandic and spoke American English with an ever so slight Icelandic accent.  There was the Slovakian bus driver in Reykjavik, who went to college there and loved living in Iceland.

Yes, there were delightful local and older people too: My young tour guide in Isafjörður, whose grandparents had lived in the abandoned area she was showing us, my older tour guide in the Shetlands, who used to be Lerwick’s harbor master, a young waiter in an Italian restaurant in Makkum, Holland, who taught himself near perfect American English without ever having been in an English speaking country; a very jovial waitress in a Dutch café in Enkhuizen and, in Doune, Scotland, the entire staff at Angelino’s restaurant.  The grand prize goes to our rental house hosts, Colin and Fiona Graham in Doune.

But with the locals it could be hit or miss.  There were some indifferent and near-rude service personnel, but P.J and I cannot remember a single one that was foreign born.  So hear ye, hear ye, you westerners (you too in the US!) … if they are taking your jobs away, there’s reason for that!  I think everyone should live and work in a country other than their own and feel what it’s like.  It’s a good experience and it expands the mind.

Lastly my compliments to the Indonesian staff on our cruise ship, who are always patient and cheerful even when some of the travelers are not.

July 10th we returned the rental car and spent time in the city of Reykjavik.  We had visited it several times before and the city is starting to feel familiar.  We spent most of the day just strolling around, visiting familiar places, and new ones like the Saga Museum, and visiting bakeries and cafés.  And that’s what it is all about for me, just getting the sense of being there.  I love Iceland!

Iceland is a growing country, at a pace much slower than glacial.  When I walked in the crack between the North American and Eurasian plates I was wondering what I was walking on because it was neither America nor Europe.  What if I fell into the crack?  They might find my bones 65 million years from now.  By that time Iceland could be the new supercontinent surrounded by the Global Ocean.  All the other continents might have been subducted underneath Icelandia or have collided with it and left their rubble in the form of huge mountain ranges. The people of Icelandia would all speak English with an Icelandic accent but they would not remember why.  There would only be two world religions, one that believed in trolls and one that believed in elves.  Iceland could become enormously wealthy with an ultra-slow financial pyramid scheme.  After all other continents had subducted under it, this time they would not have to pay it back.