Olden, Norway

 When the Captain said last evening that it was going to be a bit rough last night, he should have quoted Bette Davis and said "Buckle your seat belts.  It's going to be a bumpy night."  I think last night was even rougher than we had it on the way to Iceland in June.  It started right around when he predicted at 11:00 pm and continued until around 5:00 am.  At one point when I had to get up for the bathroom, I told Michael to "wish me luck".  I didn't time the rising from the toilet very well and nearly launched into the bathtub.  Hope we don't have a repeat of those seas.

Olden is at the end of a beautiful fjord.  Again, the weather is not the best, so the photos really don't do it justice.

That is the P&O Iona.  She is ten times bigger (5,200 passenger capacity) so she got the only berth. 

This morning was a lecture by Lt. Col. Bill Rothschild titled "The Early Years of Space Exploration".  He was really good; explained everything in a way that lay people can understand.  He worked for years with the Air Force and Boeing's Space Exploration Program.  I look forward to his future lectures.

We had a 3-hour tour scheduled to take a "Troll Car" up to see a glacier.  The temperature was 54 degrees and rain was predicted all day.  When I saw that a Troll Car is a 6-passenger open car, we decided to pass.  Instead, we took the tender in and walked around town.  Olden has only about 500 people, so the place was jumping.  While we were in town, a third ship, Viking Jupiter, arrived.  We had lunch at a local cafe that surprisingly had seats available.  I guess the others in town weren't keen to spend $26 for a beer, a soda, and a shrimp sandwich that didn't have any chips or anything along with it.  It was a good sandwich, though.  Then we wandered through the souvenir shops and bought nothing.  All three had the same merchandise at the same prices.  They seemed to be doing a pretty good business.  We walked through the food market and found prices to be at least twice what we pay at home.  And gas here is around $10 per gallon.  It has been pretty consistently $8-9 everywhere else.

Trivia was a modest success with 8/15 but good enough for a point for 3rd place.  We had a cocktail and then dinner with Lois, Patrick and Carl.  Since we hadn't had a lot of sleep last night, we skipped the show and watched some TV before turning in.  Unfortunately, the Captain announced that we should expect conditions tonight to be almost as bad as last night.