Tickledblue does a Trip Report - Norwegian Fjords on Serenade

[TickledBlue]

The performing arts center was a good place to get out of the rain for a little bit.

Bergen has a really nice big city park called Byparken.

A viking boat was at the park -- I don't know if it is always there or just there for the Constitution day celebration on the next day. Speaking of which, they were setting up carnival rides in a parking lot near the cruise ship's port. Constitution day lis like Norway's independence day but they are a lot more serious about it than here in the US. I'm getting ahead of myself, more on Constitution day when I get to Ålesund.

Beyond the viking boat, you could see Floyen viewpoint where we were earlier, it's hazy because of the light rain.

When walking into town, we missed Bryggen -- we walked right by it and didn't notice. It was mentioned in Rick Steves walking tour, but I kind of skipped over it. On the way out of town, we went into Bryggen and did a little souvenir shopping. We bought a few trinkets for work colleagues and a magnet for our fridge. Figured all the shops would be closed in Ålesund for the aforementioned Constitution day and Geiranger wouldn't have much in terms of souvenir shopping. Turned out that I was wrong on both counts. Despite that, these are the only souvenirs that we purchased on this cruise and the next on our B2B. Pictures are the souvenirs that we enjoy the most.

 

So we got back to the ship around 4 pm even though the all aboard time was 5:30 pm. We cleaned up and got to dinner by our 5:30 pm reservation and ate. I think that night was lamb chop night but I ordered the swordfish instead (I love swordfish). Mark, our waiter, brought out a serving of lamb chops in addition to our order "to share". After the swordfish (which was very good), I ate all the lamb chops too (MDW didn't want any) -- they were delicious. Mark took good are of us by doing extra things like this.

We went to the 7 pm production show "Stage to Screen" in the Tropical Theater. MDW and I like production shows in general and this one was pretty good but we didn't like it enough to go to it again on the next cruise. You won't see pictures of any of the shows in the Tropical Theater -- they say no flash photography or video which, in theory, leaves non-flash photography. I think it's kind of rude to hold up a cell phone up in front of the people behind me to take a picture that probably will be blurry with all the action so I just don't do it.

[TickledBlue]

Side track time. The Norwegian, Danish, Swedes, Finnish, etc. that use Scandinavian alphabets with "wierd" characters like Å, Å, Ä, Ö. Æ, and Ø can ignore this.

 

So the less computer-savvy may be asking yourself...How does he get those characters? They don't appear on the English language keyboard.

 

It's very simple...copy-and-paste. So, for example, if I want to refer to the Copenhagen Østerport train station, I just google for osterport -- Google is smart enough to come up with search results that contain the correct spelling.

 

All I have to do is highlight the desired word, copy with Ctrl-C (or right-click and choose copy) and then paste with Ctrl-P (or right-click and choose paste).

 

Scandinavian keyboards have these characters and there are other ways to accomplish the same thing but this is the way I do it.

[TickledBlue]

Day 5 - Ålesund

After a rainy Bergen, it was great to have a sunny and warm day in Ålesund. It was also their Constiution Day which you can read about on Wikipedia. The first order of business for us was to get off the ship and walk the steps up to Fjellstua. This was an easier hike than that in Bergen because there were 408 concrete steps up to it.

Helpful hint: Don't doddle. Fjellstua got very busy soon after we arrived there. That's when all of the tour buses got there.

The ship docked right in town. Locals wished us a happy Constitution day and handed us a handy map of the parade route marked in yellow. If you happen to visit Ålesund on Constituion day (what are the odds?), you can probably assume that this same route will be used next year (and probably every year). I already had a pretty good idea of the route from my research of past parades.

Walking along the pier, you could see Fjellstua up on the hill.

 

A closer picture of Fjellstua - you can see the concrete steps leading up to it

 

As promised (and bet you were wondering if I kept my promises), here is a picture of a gas station. Pretty sure this is the price in Norwegian Krone per liter, which is $1.75/L or $6.64/gal. Driving by gas stations this morning in my hometown, I noticed $1.939/gal for regular unleaded. Thus the electric car charging and the Tesla I saw in Bergen makes sense...

 

 

At about the halfway point, there is this nice overlook.

[TickledBlue]

Notice how nicely dressed the people are on the way up to Fjellstua. I'd give 100-to-1 odds that they are locals. Wonder how they dress on a 'normal' day. Cruise ship passengers don't bother dressing up for formal night anymore much less Norway's Constitution day.

Every now and then, the step number was provided. Almost there...

There!

 

 

 

[TickledBlue]

We talked to a couple from England the whole way down the steps. They were touring Norway in an RV. They asked questions about the cruise ship and I asked questions about touring in an RV. I was a bit surprised that RVs are used much outside of the US -- they assured me that they were gaining popularity.

Once back in town, we staked out a spot for the parade. The gentleman in the picture below talked to us about the parade and Ålesund a bit. The parade consisted largely of elementary and secondary school children as well as some organizations. There were some bands but no floats. I can remember on 1 vehicle in the whole parade.

 

 

After the parade, there were various festivities going on throughout the city. Many restaurants had alfresco dining that were packed with people. The band below played music and marched from the center of the city to the church a few blocks away.

On the backside of this church, there was some somewhat somber ceremony going on, I was going to ask an attendee but it seemed like it would have been rude or maybe disrespectful.

 

The cat encountered in Ålesund wanted to be petted.

[Magster1987]

Great review! Love the quality of the pictures.

[WisconsinFan]

How fun to be in Norway on Syttende mai! Being of Norwegian descent it is a special day and we still have family "in the old country.: We live not too far from a town where many Norwegian's settled and they still celeberat Syttende mai in a big way. The high school has a team of boys and girls who learn the traditional dances and preform. The costumes are authentic as well. Unfortunately for me, only a few of your photos are showing on my computer. I hope to take a trip to Norway like this some day.

[Beachin2]

Do you recall is the ship offered a Copenhagen tour on turn-around day for B2B? I know they offer post-cruise, but those end at the airport or train station.

 

Have several pages of notes on the ports from your review - THANK YOU!

[TickledBlue]

Do you recall is the ship offered a Copenhagen tour on turn-around day for B2B? I know they offer post-cruise, but those end at the airport or train station.

 

Have several pages of notes on the ports from your review - THANK YOU!

 

Sorry in advance for the long-winded response and a lot more information than you asked for, but here goes...

 

I didn't look at any shore excursions on the turn-around day once we were on the cruise ship. Before the cruise, I did take note of those excursions that ended at the airport or train station but there weren't any offered that returned you to the ship at that time.

 

My guess is that there weren't any offered on the ship either. Here's why...I forget the exact number, but there were around 160-170 that were doing the next cruise. Out of that number, there would have been a certain percentage that wanted to stay on the ship, those that booked an excursion through a 3rd party, and those who toured on their own (like we did). I don't think there would have been enough interest in a particular tour to make it happen (but I could be wrong).

 

There was no talk about any excursions being available during our consecutive cruisers meeting and they didn't seem to miss any opportunities to try to sell you stuff. Don't get me wrong, the amount of selling wasn't any worse than any other cruise that we did but there was a lot of sales pitches. In fact, I kind of liked the way they tried to sell you stuff on this ship in a not-so-intrusive way. You may be just going up or down the stairs on deck 5 and they'd hand you the 2 parts of a ticket that would be used in a drawing. If you were interested, you would take that ticket to the on board shops and they'd give you a sales pitch before the drawing. If not interested, obviously just don't go -- no fuss, no muss.

 

If you don't have mobility impairments, touring Copenhagen on your own is pretty easy. We used Rick Steves walking tour to determine where to go and it provided some information on what we were seeing. Alternately, there is a HOHO bus, a free walking tour, as well as some other tours you could do. The trick is getting to the city center -- you could take the bus (like we did) or a taxi. Taking the bus was relatively cheap and easy (see picture and paragraphs below).

The building in the foreground is the terminal building and when you are walking through it, you'll see a sign above a door for public bus or taxis that takes you to the street. If you have Danish Krone (DKK), you can go directly to the bus stop that I have circled in yellow and pay the bus driver, it is 24 DKK to go to Nørreport which is the end of the line for the 25 bus. The 1st bus shows up at 8 am and was pretty much on time.

 

If you only have cash in US $ or Euros, you can pay in that currency to the guy (which I'll call the bus ticket crate guy or BTCG) who is at the shipping crate circled in red. You can buy tickets for both ways -- BTCG will time/date stamp the outgoing ticket, you'll have to write time/date before boarding the bus back. It was $4 per ticket good for 2 hours.

 

Word of caution here -- if you want to take the bus/train to the airport (which we did after our 2nd cruise), it is much better to have DKK and get tickets from the bus driver because BTCG only sells 2 zone tickets -- you'll need a ticket that gets you to the airport (not sure how many zones). Those cost 72 DKK. On our turnover day, BTCG asked us where we wanted to go and seemed to indicate that he had both types of tickets. So after our 2nd cruise we were heading to the airport without any DKK, we could only buy the 2 zone tickets (to our surprise) from from BTCG just to get us to Østerport and then we could buy the 72 DKK tickets from a machine there using a debit card that used a PIN (US chip signature cards did not work).

 

You can bring full sized luggage on the bus, as long as you can man-handle it yourself. When I was doing research on this, I got conflicting information. There is adequate space on bus 25 to put it. On both trips from the port (turnaround day and going home day), the bus driver was very patient with people buying tickets and putting luggage in an open spot on the bus. Both times, that open spot had lots of luggage piled up in it. Perhaps conflicting information I got was because other buses may not have this space. Bus 25 seemed to be a special cruise ship bus and went directly from port to Østerport and then ended at Nørreport - only those 2 stops (and I presume did the loop over again). Later in the afternoon on our turnaround day, we picked it up at Nørreport and it took us bus stop across the street from the yellow circle in the picture above.

 

Now for a short feel-good story...

On our turnaround day, we bought 4 tickets for MDW and myself to get to Nørreport and then from there back to the cruise port. As we were sitting on the bus, there was a young couple with luggage that tried to board the bus but was turned away because the didn't have DKK. A guy on the bus noticed this and passed a 50 DKK note to people coming on board instructing them to give it to that couple. They were appreciative but didn't know who to thank because that money was passed from person-to-person to get to them.

Edited June 13, 2017 by TickledBlue

[Beachin2]

Excellent info - thank you. Unfortunately, there are mobility issues to consider, so the walking tour is out. We do use Rick Steves to map out a "must see/must do" list though. Probably just grab the HOHO bus which I understand is very close to the terminal.

 

I'll file away the airport info - we are staying on board for the TA so our airport will be Boston (and that one I know well) :).

[Mr. Click]

Thanks for the review. We are headed to Norway and the fjords in May on the Independence out of Southampton. During the last few years we had to put up with winter in the Northeast the Serenade was our Caribbean escape and we loved the ship. The one thing about your review that really scared me, all of that white stuff in the first few posts. I have kind of forgotten what it is and want to keep it that way....

[TickledBlue]

Thanks for the review. We are headed to Norway and the fjords in May on the Independence out of Southampton. During the last few years we had to put up with winter in the Northeast the Serenade was our Caribbean escape and we loved the ship. The one thing about your review that really scared me, all of that white stuff in the first few posts. I have kind of forgotten what it is and want to keep it that way....

 

That white stuff was only around at Geiranger and only at altitude. If you want to avoid it, it's easy to do. I was actually looking forward to it in the Twizy since we had an extremely mild winter in Indiana and I didn't shovel or snow blow once.

[TickledBlue]

A picture of the gathering at the church mentioned in post 105...

 

Some more sight-seeing around Ålesund...

 

 

And another Tesla...

We had a long port call at Ålesund - from 8 AM to 8 PM. We were ready to get back to the ship long before we left port. I would have liked to do a Trollstigen (troll road) tour in addition to sightseeing the town; however, I couldn't find any that were available this early in the year. So back at the ship...

[TickledBlue]

 

 

[BNBR]

Side track time. The Norwegian, Danish, Swedes, Finnish, etc. that use Scandinavian alphabets with "wierd" characters like Å, Å, Ä, Ö. Æ, and Ø can ignore this.

 

So the less computer-savvy may be asking yourself...How does he get those characters? They don't appear on the English language keyboard.

 

It's very simple...copy-and-paste. So, for example, if I want to refer to the Copenhagen Østerport train station, I just google for osterport -- Google is smart enough to come up with search results that contain the correct spelling.

 

All I have to do is highlight the desired word, copy with Ctrl-C (or right-click and choose copy) and then paste with Ctrl-P (or right-click and choose paste).

 

Scandinavian keyboards have these characters and there are other ways to accomplish the same thing but this is the way I do it.

 

 

For what it's worth, and an interesting fact if you don't know... the Finnish language and alphabet is nothing at all like Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian - which can be borderline interchangeable.

[BNBR]

I'm a little curious what your overall impression has been with this cruise. To me, visiting all these Norwegian towns seems redundant. But could the same be said about visiting Caribbean ports? Sorry if you mentioned this, but have you done the itinerary that visits Russia, Germany, Finland, etc? I have a ton of family in Denmark and we thought it might be nice to do a cruise there with everyone instead of our yearly Norwegian ski trip. But I'm concerned that visiting all the Norwegian towns would be very boring to them.

[tonkie]

I don't want to hijacker your excellent review, but I couldn't stop myself posting these 2 shots

 

Snap :D

 

IMG_7124 by tonkie93, on Flickr

 

 

IMG_7136 by tonkie93, on Flickr

 

 

I will remove shots if you want me to

[BNBR]

We talked to a couple from England the whole way down the steps. They were touring Norway in an RV. They asked questions about the cruise ship and I asked questions about touring in an RV. I was a bit surprised that RVs are used much outside of the US -- they assured me that they were gaining popularity.

 

I was in the Danish countryside last week, and I can assure you, RV's are everywhere. One after another. It's very popular. More travel trailers than motorhomes. And the styles are much, much smaller than even typical American RV's. Consider they don't have trucks so the travel trailers must be small and light enough to pull with a 4 cyl car. The motorhomes are very small and I didn't notice any slides on any of them. Lots and lots of Germans visit Denmark in RV's as well.

[TickledBlue]

For what it's worth, and an interesting fact if you don't know... the Finnish language and alphabet is nothing at all like Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian - which can be borderline interchangeable.

 

No, I didn't know this. Admittedly, I'm pretty ignorant of these languages as are most Americans. I found very easy to tour in all of those countries since everyone spoke English.

[BNBR]

No, I didn't know this. Admittedly, I'm pretty ignorant of these languages as are most Americans. I found very easy to tour in all of those countries since everyone spoke English.

 

While Finland is Nordic, it's not considered Scandinavian :)

[TickledBlue]

I'm a little curious what your overall impression has been with this cruise. To me, visiting all these Norwegian towns seems redundant. But could the same be said about visiting Caribbean ports? Sorry if you mentioned this, but have you done the itinerary that visits Russia, Germany, Finland, etc? I have a ton of family in Denmark and we thought it might be nice to do a cruise there with everyone instead of our yearly Norwegian ski trip. But I'm concerned that visiting all the Norwegian towns would be very boring to them.

 

I guess if I've been to a lot of Norwegian towns before, I guess I could see how it may seem redundant after a while. They were novel to us since it was our first time there. Even if you've been to a lot of Norwegian towns before, Geiranger Fjord, all by itself might make the cruise worth it, but of course you could get there by other means as well. If we were to go again, I'd likely do tours like kayaking, RIB boat, hiking, etc. outside of the towns.

 

I'd say there is more variety in the Caribbean ports because many of them have quite different histories. We've been to the most of the ports there many, many times. We either do a tour that we haven't done before, an activity that we did in the past but loved it (snorkling, kayaking, etc.), or stay on the ship and enjoy its amenities without others around.

 

Our 2nd cruise on our B2B was a 7 day Baltic cruise and we went round trip from Copenhagen to Stockholm, Tallin, St. Petersburg, and Helsinki. I opted provide a trip report on this cruise because the information I found pre-cruise was notedly less than Baltic cruises. RubyFisch did an excellent review on this cruise here.

[TickledBlue]

I don't want to hijacker your excellent review, but I couldn't stop myself posting these 2 shots

 

Snap :D

 

IMG_7124 by tonkie93, on Flickr

 

 

IMG_7136 by tonkie93, on Flickr

 

 

I will remove shots if you want me to

 

I had to do a double-take to see that these weren't the same as mine. I guess we share the same eye for framing shots :).

 

I don't own any photo rights to the landmarks or that boat so feel free to distribute your own photos as you wish :D

[BNBR]

I guess if I've been to a lot of Norwegian towns before, I guess I could see how it may seem redundant after a while. They were novel to us since it was our first time there. Even if you've been to a lot of Norwegian towns before, Geiranger Fjord, all by itself might make the cruise worth it, but of course you could get there by other means as well. If we were to go again, I'd likely do tours like kayaking, RIB boat, hiking, etc. outside of the towns.

 

I'd say there is more variety in the Caribbean ports because many of them have quite different histories. We've been to the most of the ports there many, many times. We either do a tour that we haven't done before, an activity that we did in the past but loved it (snorkling, kayaking, etc.), or stay on the ship and enjoy its amenities without others around.

 

Our 2nd cruise on our B2B was a 7 day Baltic cruise and we went round trip from Copenhagen to Stockholm, Tallin, St. Petersburg, and Helsinki. I opted provide a trip report on this cruise because the information I found pre-cruise was notedly less than Baltic cruises. RubyFisch did an excellent review on this cruise here.

 

Awesome, I'm very interested in your 2nd cruise. Side note, we had considered going to Norway in the summer and doing the Norway In A Nutshell scenic train from Bergen to Oslo. I believe Rick Steve's covered that one, too. Most Americans don't realize just how cheap it is to visit Norway right now. Part of the reason we go there for skiing, it's better and a fraction of the cost of anywhere in the States. Plus it's interesting to visit a different country :)

 

Looking forward to more of your posts about the trip.

[TickledBlue]

I was in the Danish countryside last week, and I can assure you, RV's are everywhere. One after another. It's very popular. More travel trailers than motorhomes. And the styles are much, much smaller than even typical American RV's. Consider they don't have trucks so the travel trailers must be small and light enough to pull with a 4 cyl car. The motorhomes are very small and I didn't notice any slides on any of them. Lots and lots of Germans visit Denmark in RV's as well.

 

I was envisioning a small American-sized RV. But this make sense, given the cost of hotels, fuel and all of the vacation time that Europeans enjoy.

[tonkie]

I had to do a double-take to see that these weren't the same as mine. I guess we share the same eye for framing shots :).

 

I don't own any photo rights to the landmarks or that boat so feel free to distribute your own photos as you wish :D

 

That's the only reason I posted them, just to show the similarities:D

I won't post anymore in your thread