For me, the nice thing about a cruise ship is that dinner, sleeping, and breakfast all happen in one enclosed space -- WHILE traveling to the next destination. The bad thing is that the sightseeing has to be kept to few hours or you'll miss the boat (so to speak). For Alice, the boat is more fun than the sightseeing, so it works perfectly for her. Our first stop was Oslo (pronounced "oosh-lu") and we took a taxi to the Viking Museum.
The ship in the top picture is 70 feet long, almost 17 feet wide, its mast was over 30 feet high, and it could go up to 11 mph. It was built prior to 800 A.D. and was found in a burial mound. (Apparently, some vikings had their ships buried with them.) Perhaps one of the most amazing things is the detailed wood carving done by these people who are often classified as "medieval, pagan, and pirates."
As we were walking from the Viking Museum to the Kon-Tiki Museum, we saw some "Hop On Hop Off" buses go by. We talked to one of the bus drivers at the Kon-Tiki Museum and found that they were cheaper and more convenient than a taxi or a rental car (for less than the price of a taxi, we were able to buy a 24-hour pass that stopped about every 20-30 minutes at the boat as well as all the major attractions in each city), so they became our primary mode of transportation. At the museum, we saw the "Kon-Tiki," which was the raft (below) that Thor Heyerdahl used to sail from Peru to an island near Tahiti in 1947.
The museum also houses the "Ra II," which is a papyrus ship (below) that Heyerdahl used to sail from Morocco to Barbados in 1970.
Our boat docked in the Oslo Fjord (which in the geological sense, is not really a fjord, but an inlet from the Baltic Sea). Below is the Oslo "Fjord," a view of the boat from Olso, and a view of Oslo from the boat,
The sunset was magnificent as we left the Oslo "Fjord."
