We are not embarking until tonight and so today is our Bergen day. We are lucky to have gotten a head start on many people, by having seen many things in Bergen on Saturday. However, there are things we haven’t seen and so we are signed up to take the Bergen tour.
We have breakfast in our room which is nice because we can stay in our comfy clothes for a while longer. The breakfast arrives mostly cold and we will need to rethink our choices. After breakfast we are off on our assigned bus for a two hour overview of Bergen.
Our local guide informs us that we are quite lucky that it is not raining this morning as it averages five days of rain out of every week in Bergen. He also lets us know that this has been the rainiest June on record. So, yay, after being wet for the last two days we are able to enjoy merely overcast skies. We bus around Bergen seeing old and new things and then are treated to a view from a vantage point from an overlook of Bergen and the fjord on which it sits. We take the obligatory pictures.
We have another stop downtown where we have a good vantage point to take a pictures of our boat and the Hanseatic district. Finally we stop near the Royal Palace where it appears that King Harold and his court are not home since the Norwegian flag is not flying from the top turret.
We get lots of facts about Bergen and Norway in general and are back in time for lunch. We try to choose some healthy things from the buffet but I know that buffet eating is especially difficult and I find myself wanting to check out the pizza and have a bite of cookie at the end.
We have considered going back out but it is spitting rain, windy, and cold plus we have been up since 3 AM. Thanks, jet lag. So we take a nap instead and go down to the theater later in the afternoon for a talk about our next day’s destination, Geiranger. After an embarkation toast we head to the World Cafe for dinner.
Dinner tonight is a pale comparison of the first night’s dinner at the Chef’s Table. First of all it is really noisy. We find out later that the restaurant is really crowded due to its being lobster night. I have a shrimp cocktail and poached salmon and John has foie gras and a pasta with boar ragu. The food is fine but the experience is not great. We will have to figure out what is best for us.
We head to our cabin for another night’s troubled sleep. Seas are very rough and being in the front of the ship exacerbates the motion of the swells. Sleep is hard to come by.