June 12, the main (ticketed) entrance to the British Museum in London.

Scotland and Norway, 2025

June 21st - Honningsvåg (for North Cape), Norway

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As we continued to walk the streets of Honningsvåg, we saw this repurposed telephone booth, now being used as a little free library. What a great idea, although I don't believe we have any telephone booths left anywhere in the U.S.

And we continued on, seeing what we could see as we headed back to the ship.

By a little after 4:00, we were back at the dock. All aboard wasn't until 7:30, but we were tired and, of course, hungry.

Back on the ship, we went to our rooms and dropped off our stuff - our jackets and backpacks - then, passing on tonight's formal dinner, we headed up to the buffet to get something easy to eat. As usual, I did a lousy job of documenting our buffet meal, but it was just a bunch of a la carte selections of all sorts of stuff, as usual.

Tonight's show, "5-Skies", featuring the ship's production company, looked like it was going to be exciting. Click here to see a bunch of colorful pictures from the show, as well as my review.

After the show, as disappointing as it was, we stuck around to hear our Cruise Director, Dan, read some guest-submitted jokes. They were pretty good, often some European country slamming another (kind of like Minnesota-Iowa jokes), bringing cheers from some, boos from others. It was definitely more entertaining than the show.

Today was a very special day and we were in a very special place for it. It was the summer solstice, June 21st, the longest day of the year, and the day at our way-up-north latitudenoteWe were sitting at 71° 09' 50.2"N 26° 04' 47.6"E that has the most daylight - 24 hours of daylightnoteTechnically speaking, at the North Cape you can see the sun all day from mid-May to the end of July. Today was actually the day when the sun would take the longest time to set before beginning to rise.! The sun won't set below the horizon tonight, and, if we can make it until midnight, we can watch it go down to just above the horizon, then reverse itself and start rising, sunset and sunrise in a matter of seconds. So we watched, hoping the clouds wouldn't obscure the sun and keep us from experiencing this once in a lifetime (for us) celestial event.

The ship was holding a "Midnight Sun" party, and thinking maybe something special was going on, we went down to take a look. But it was just a small band playing music while people milled around, some dancing. We were all waiting for that midnight hour when the magic would occur, but nothing special was happening here, so we decided to go back to our room. We were lucky; as the ship sailed westward from Honningsvåg to Tromso, our next port, the view from our balcony looked right at the setting and rising sun. We had front row seats! Next     Top