We left out of Copenhagen and decided to go a couple of days early. This was the view from the hotel:
Here's the Little Mermaid. Doesn't she look sad?
This is one of the lovely waterfront areas:
Next up - Oslo! This is part of the old castle:
We went to the Vigeland Sculpture Park. Amazing!
And then we drove up into the hills. Here's a view of the fjord:
Onward to Scotland. I love Scotland!
We went to Glamis Castle - childhood home of the Queen Mother. So pretty!
And then to St. Andrews - where Wills went to college and they play a lot of golf. ;-)
Next port - Dublin. First we went to Powerscourt Gardens. It might look familiar...it's used in a lot of TV and movies. Gorgeous!
Then back into the city for shopping and more sightseeing:
The next day we were in Northern Ireland. We went out into the countryside to the Giant's Causeway. Fascinating, geologically speaking. Very, very windy!!
We also went by Dunluce Castle. The kitchen (and some of the kitchen staff) dropped into the sea sometime in the 1700s. Eeek! It's scenic, though. :o)
Then onward to Iceland. Not icy - but again very, very windy. Here's part of Reykjavik:
And here is the Blue Lagoon:
Our final stop was in Greenland. It wasn't green, exactly, but it wasn't snowy either. The population of this town: 3500. The number of passengers on the ship: 3044. Whoa!
We only saw a few small icebergs, since it isn't really the right time of year for them. The visible part of this one was about the size of a car, I'm thinking.
We were supposed to stop in Newfoundland but a bad weather forecast caused the captain to cancel that stop.
Since we had to be out of our cabins by 8:00 am and our flight wasn't until 1:00 pm, we decided to do an Everglades airboat ride in Ft. Lauderdale. Look who swam up to our boat:
So there you go, peeps. My vacation in a nutshell. I'll do a post with a vacay reading wrap-up and overall impressions of the cruise - for example, holy moly there were a lot of readers on this boat! Everybody had a book (or Kindle or Sony) in his or her hand pretty much all the time. Heh.
ETA: Let's see if I can put some very short video clips on here. First up, remember I said we missed our stop in Newfoundland because of bad weather? Well, we didn't completely miss the bad weather...here is a little bit of video I shot from our balcony after I could get the door open (the winds had us sealed in for a while) - so really, it was worse than this overnight, etc. If your volume is up, you can hear the wind get much louder as I turn toward the front of the ship. Wheeee!
And I mentioned our airboat ride thru the Everglades - if you've never been on an airboat, you should totally go. It's cool! And loud! Check out a brief bit:
AMAZING! I LOVE Ireland. Went in high school then again this past May. Would LOVE to go to Scotland. My great, great (great?) Grandparents came from Scotland. Thanks to Ancestry.com I know exaclty where they lived in 1851...:)
LOVE the Copenhagen pic with the boat's and the buildings....looks like a post card!!!!
Sound like you had an awesome time!!!!!
Who was the cruise through?
Thanks Mollie! The pictures turned out really well, I thought. And we had a most excellent time!
Scotland is one of my favorite places! It looks like where I grew up, the people are great...it feels like home, you know? If I had to pick somewhere abroad to live, I would probably end up there. :)
It was a Princess cruise. They were repositioning the ship for the winter. It's been sailing around Europe all summer but will be cruising the Caribbean all winter. Good deals to be had on the repositioning cruises, if you have the time - they're usually about 2 1/2 weeks.
Thanks ames!
We're thinking we might do two shorter cruises next year instead of one long one. LOL My mom misses my dad when we're gone as long as we were this year (and last year). Awww, so sweet.
Before our ship picked us up in Copenhagen, it had been on a 10-day cruise in the Baltic (lots of people stayed onboard for the crossing). We kept seeing pictures and it looked beautiful so we might do that one next fall. And maybe Alaska in the spring - it's the only state my mom hasn't been to and she wants to be able to say she's been to all 50. She's so silly.
Gorgeous! I'm soooo jealous. Glad you had such a great time. :)