Monday was a perfect and perfectly relaxing sea day. Unfortunately our perfect and perfectly relaxing sea day was over five months ago, so the details are sketchy! I know our activities involved coffee, food, getting things organized for our two week cruise, meeting on-line friends, tour companions, and dining companions in real life, food, relaxing, food, a show, and sleep.

For dinner on Monday we went to Tamarind. It may be my new favorite specialty restaurant! Everything we had was delicious, and I was happy we planned to eat there again during the cruise.

Tuesday didn’t look too promising at first, but we were in Norway so it was half expected and it wasn’t going to slow us down! We had a late morning arrival, so we took advantage of the open morning to attend a class in the gym (we had purchased an unlimited class pass) and have breakfast in Club Orange before we disembarked. I had the traditional American breakfast and wasn’t impressed (my eggs were overcooked), but Jim’s Full English breakfast was great!

By the time we got to Alesund the weather was perfect! We couldn’t have asked for better…brilliant blue skies, plenty of sunshine, and not too cold! We arrived on time and reported to the theater to disembark for our tour.

We thought the disembarkation system the Nieuw Statendam uses was very modern and efficient. They make announcements, but the whole process is streamlined by the use of a departures board. The only problem we saw was the people who simply refuse to follow directions because they have to be first.

Once our Hjorundfjord Cruise group was called we quickly disembarked and found the excursion boat for a three-hour tour. Thankfully our three-hour tour was better than Gilligan’s! We chose a corner upstairs and we were off to see our first Norwegian fjords.

At first I was disappointed there was so little seating, but honestly it was much easier to see both sides this way. It didn’t take long for us to realize Norway needed to go to the top of the “must go back” list. I’m going to let the pictures from the excursion do the explaining.

Our fjord cruise had originally been scheduled for the afternoon and we learned it was moved to the morning after we boarded the ship. At first we were disappointed, but it ended up working perfectly since the weather in the morning was bright and sunny but it clouded over as we got towards the afternoon.

We grabbed a quick lunch at the restaurant on the pier…it was good but predictably overpriced, and set off to see the town.

Of course, we didn’t have a map and went completely in the wrong direction! We didn’t mind the walk, and we eventually made it to our destination.

It was a great day, but we were ready to go when we returned to the ship. Only one more sea day stood between us and the reason for the trip…Iceland!