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Content Notes

1. Together, Mei-O and I took a lot of pictures and videos. And I've also used a lot of Teresa's pictures that she shared with us. (Almost all of the 16:9 format pictures are from Teresa.) It took me quite a while to go through them all, choose the ones that I wanted to use, edit many of them (straighten them, fix perspective issues, adjust brightness and contrast, etc.), research them when necessary (I've included some educational information about many of the things we saw and places we visited), and write the narrative to go along with them to show the progression of our journey. It is important to note that this is not just a website full of pictures of beautiful scenery and historic sites that we saw on the trip, but rather, a relatively complete chronological accounting of where we went, what we did, and what we saw, including things like street scenes (without us in the picture), the open sea (on sea days), our ship, some of our meals, selfies, maps, and other perhaps somewhat mundane pictures. The format of the site makes it easy to skim through pictures when you find them not as interesting as you hoped.
2. I really failed at capturing our meals. For some of them I may have taken only one or two pictures, and not actually of a significant part of the meal (maybe just a bowl of soup or a salad), especially when we ate in the World Fresh Marketplace buffet where we kept going back for more and more small plates of stuff. (Well, not always so small!) So you'll often see a single picture used as a place marker just to maintain the timeline's continuity.
3. There are several letters in the Norwegian alphabet that don't exist in English, specifically å, æ, ø and their uppercase equivalents Å, Æ, Ø^note

   Programming note for me
   å is å	Å is Å
   æ is æ	Æ is Æ
   ø is ø	Ø is Ø

   . I've tried to use them when appropriate, but occasionally, I may accidentally use an English "counterpart". For example, I may write Tromso for the port of Tromsø or Honningsvag for the port of Honningsvåg. In some cases, when getting information about a place, a building, someone's name, etc. from an English-language article on the internet, only the English spelling may appear, unknown to me that there is a Norwegian-alphabet letter in some specific word. (I apologize to all Norwegians for this.)
4. If you see any prices in the pictures, during our trip, the Norwegian dollar, the krone, (kroner, plural), is abbreviated NOK or NKr. (The Euro is not used in Norway.) 1 NOK was worth around US$0.098! (10 NOK is US$.98, and 100 NOK would be US$9.78.)
5. There are bound to be some errors in here; typos, spelling errors, links that don't work, factual errors, grammatical errors, etc. Please feel free to let me know if you find any. As a note, when viewing the site on a phone or tablet, there are several programming bugs (mostly related to font sizes. You'll know them when you see them) that I just haven't been able to fix (I'm not that great of a web developer, I just sort of "wing it" at times.) Any other comments, questions, or help improving this site are also welcome.

Some Further Notes

General

1. We celebrated our 56^th anniversary during the cruise on June 25^th. The cruise line did this for us.
2. Norway is 7 hours ahead of Rochester, so if the narrative shows us doing something at 10:00 AM, it is 3:00 AM in Rochester.
3. We mostly had good weather with temperatures in the 40s to low 60s (around 4.5°C to 18.3°C). It was perfect for me - I love temperatures like that - but Mei-O, Steve, and Teresa were often cold, especially when it was windy. (Mei-O fearing I might catch cold, made me buy (and wear!) a winter jacket. We got it, and one for her too, free using our ship's credits.) We encountered rain a few days while on shore (our new jackets helped there!), but it was often just light rain and very short lived, and seldom ruined our time exploring. (You'll probably notice some pictures taken from inside our tour bus will have rain drops on the windows.)
4. Within the last year or so, the UK began requiring an ETA (Electronic Travel Authorization, sort of a simplified visa), so we had to apply for and pay for those ($22.23 per person), otherwise we couldn't get into London or Scotland. Once we found the right website^noteThere are plenty of scam
   websites and even phone
   apps out there that charge
   exorbitant application
   fees. One I looked at
   wanted $249 for our two
   ETAs., the application process was easy and the ETA came through approved within minutes.
5. Prior to our departure, we booked some of our shore excursions through Princess Cruise Lines and some through third party travel companies^noteThe shore excursions offered
   by Princess sold out quickly,
   even several months before
   the cruise was to begin, so
   our only option was to look
   for third party offerings on
   sites like Viking Adventure
   and GetYourGuide.. Teresa did the research on all of them and we all agreed that they seemed reasonable. At the ports where we didn't book shore excursions, we just did them on our own, just walking around town, checking out the popular "can't miss" sights we found from literature provided by the ship and from the internet. Those "self-guided" tours turned out quite good.

Navigating this website

1. This website is best viewed on a desktop computer or a laptop.
2. As you're viewing the various pages of this website, click on any picture to see it full size.
3. Important: When you see a picture with a black border around it like this,
   
   
   
   look for the "Click here" link in the text to see a bunch of related pictures. If you don't click on this link, you'll miss seeing the pictures we took during our shore excursions and self-guided tours of the various towns, cities, and sights we visited. (These correspond to the Picture Pages you can find under "Extra Pages" below.)
4. If (on a desktop computer or laptop) you hover your pointing device over any of the days on the day line,
   
   Day   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17
   where we were that day will pop up. (Try it, though the links purposely don't work here.)
5. When you see a link followed by a minutes and seconds designation in parenthesis like this, (0:25), it means the link is to a video and the numbers represent the length of the video. The video will open in a new window. Be sure to close it when you're done. These videos are all hosted on my Google drive. For some reason, often, when clicking on a video link, the link will fail, and a "There was a problem playing this video." message (like this) will be displayed. If you simply close that window and click on the link again, it will load the second time.
6. When you see a green word or phrase underlined like thisa supplemental note or quick fact (it looks like a link, but nothing happens if you click on it), hovering your mouse pointer over it will display a short supplemental note or a quick fact. Similarly, if you see a superscripted green "note" like this^notea supplemental note
   or quick fact, it will pop up a short supplemental note or a quick fact.when you hover over it. (There are some of these above, so you've probably figured it out by now.)

You can begin with the first day of our journey (getting from Rochester to London) by clicking on the image below, or you can go to the day-by-day list below to view any specific day or place. Or, as mentioned in the first paragraph on this page, you can go directly to the Picture Pages. And be sure to check out the other "extra pages" below.

Click this image of Haugesund, Norway, to begin with Day 1.

Extra Pages

Here are some other pages of pictures you may want to look at:

• Here are some of our formal dinner menus in a very readable format. I didn't take pictures of all of them, skipping the menus for the nights we didn't eat in the formal dining room.
• Picture pages. At several of the places we visited, I took a lot of pictures which, rather than displaying them on the page for that specific day, warranted their own page. (If you've been through the whole website, you've probably already seen these.)
• Miscellaneous pictures, pictures that either didn't fit, or which I just chose not to include, in the day by day narrative of the trip.
• All of the page headers I created for this website. They tell an interesting story all by themselves.
• All the pictures displayed on this website. There are a lot, so this page may take a while to load.