CECILIA CLARK P HOTOGRAPHY

We left Hurtigruten's Trollfjord and walked less than a mile to the Clarion Hotel Admiral where we stayed for one night before catching a train back to Oslo. Before arriving, we booked a private walking tour of Bergen through Tours by Locals . The tour began at 9:00 am. Our guide did a good job pointing out things we probably wouldn't have noticed on our own. Several hundred years ago, German-speaking traders (Hansa) would arrive in Bryggen with boatloads of grain, cloth, and

Molde has been a city since 1742 but because of its history of unfortunate town fires followed by German bombings in 1940, most buildings are post-war, mid-century architecture. The city of Molde gradually rises up from the waterfront allowing spectacular views of the 222 partially snow-capped mountain peaks from every elevation. Ferries are so frequent that they pass each other on the way in or out of Molde's ferry harbor. The first Molde Church was a wooden church errected

As the ship headed toward Lødingen for the noon arrival, the skies were very gray and it was soon snowing. Once docked, conveniently, the snow lessened and stopped. Lødingen is on the southeastern corner of the island of Hinnoya. Its climate is classified as "continental subarctic climate." It was cold. We were in port just 3 hours--just enough time to walk almost to the town center and back. We had hoped to walk to the lighthouse (last photo above), but didn't get there. We

Today, we visited a beautiful hotel that I will never/would never check into. We went to the Sorrisniva Igloo Hotel. The hotel representative told us that normally it takes about six weeks to build the igloo hotel but this year, winter temperatures were warm. Once temperatures came down there were only about two weeks remaining to build the hotel before the ice igloo season began. Every year the designers have a different theme. This year it was Greek Gods. The construction

Ålesund is a pretty port town on the west coast of Norway burned to the ground in 1904. About 10,000 people lost their homes. In planning their rebuilding, the townspeople decided to go with the Art Nouveau architectural style of that current period. The modern structures outside of the old town are not strictly Art Nouveau in style. There was just one death from the fire which occured when a 70-year old woman went back in to retrieve her sewing machine which was her only s

Edvard Munch's "The Scream" We are in Norway for a Hurtigruten coastal cruise to the North Cape which will begin tomorrow. All our flights were painless and on time despite Finnair canceling our flight from Dallas to Helsinki the day before we were to fly. Before we had time to panic, we received a subsequent email from Finnair putting us on an American Airlines flight which took us first to London and then to Oslo. It was a much better flight with less time on the ground. Th