The last long cruise for a while(?), but what a boat ride.

Very soon Barbara and I will fly to London to embark the less than 300 guest Silver Cloud* a couple of days later at Southampton for a 7,300 mile cruise.

The first segment of this two segment cruise will be a riverboat like port a day exploration of the great cities of the North Sea coast of Europe. We will stop at Honfleur in Normandy, Oostende for Bruge and Gent and then Antwerp in Belgium, then a day in Amsterdam. We hope to take the high speed train from Hamburg to for a  day visit to Berlin. We will transit the Kiel Canal. I'm told that the Kiel Canal provides a kind of a land voyage similar to transiting the Suez Canal but with cows in pastures on either side of the ship instead of anti-Israel slogans in the desert. After emerging from the Kiel Canal we stop in former East Germany's Warnemunde to see Rostok, and then after a short stop in Sweden arrive in Copenhagen for a 24 hour visit.

The second and longer part of the cruise will depart Copenhagen for the North Sea, with stops in Bergen and then in and out of many Norwegian fjords, around the most northern Europe mainland North Cape at 71.5 North Latitude, and then into the Barents and White Seas to call at three ports in very Northern Russia, then returning to Copenhagen via a bunch of additional Norwegian stops.

Much of the Norwegian and Russian portion of the cruise will be above the Arctic Circle in 24 hour sunlight. There will be lots of opportunities to eat herring and observe wildlife, which is better than the other way around I believe.

After 50 days in the South Pacific earlier this year, we do not plan more long cruises for a while. I also didn't plan to catch a cold or buy a new TV set.

*Silver Cloud looks like a lifeboat for the merely mid-sized mass market Emerald Princess. I took the picture above in 2009 when we were across the dock in Granada in the southeastern Caribbean. The 113,561 gross ton Emerald Princess carries a maximum of 3599 guests and 1200 crew members. By comparison, the 16,000 ton Silver Cloud sails with a maximum of 296 guests and 222 crew members. The largest cruise ships nowadays hold roughly twice as many guests as the Emerald Princess, very roughly indeed. The Silver Cloud next to one of these ships would look like a dingy.