Day Two at Sea — Jim Winslett

Day two at sea.

Yesterday was a ‘lazy day’ - lots of naps happened and I did pretty much everything there was to do on the ship.

I’ll admit, I expected to be bored today. Full disclosure: leisure makes me fidgety. I don’t do “chill” very well. If I sit still for too long, I get antsy and I *need* something to do.

So I wasn’t particularly looking forward to a second day in a row at sea with nothing to (ahem) sea but the horizon. The activities on board, like the spa and exercise room and game tables, were all chock full of people who were also looking for something to do.

OH, I didn’t talk about the spa yet. I’ll have to copy/paste the pics from the Viking website, as they obviously don’t allow you to take pictures in there.

The centre of the spa has a hot tub with really hot water and a big pool with not-as-hot water (but still hot). Both have bubble jets.

Reminder that you can click any image and open it on your screen fully without scrolling

This main area also includes a steam room, snow grotto (basically a closet with a bench and snow), and two showers: the ‘experience shower’ where you get a rain head and multiple other shower heads hitting you from all sides and a bucket shower, which you’re supposed to do after the steam room. You step into the shower while you’re still steamy, pull the lever, and a bucket of ice cold water pours onto you.

I didn’t bother with that.

On either side are mens' and womens’ areas with dry saunas and ice-cold plunge pools. The concept is similar: sit in the sauna for awhile, the plunge into the icy pool, the repeat. It’s traditional in Nordic countries to do this.

I’m not Nordic, so I took a hard pass on that - but I did a similar thing going from the hot tub on the back deck to the unheated pool and back, so there’s that.

Anyway, we headed for the Explorer’s lounge at the front of the ship for brekkie today because Rob wanted Norwegian pancakes.

They’re plenty good, but not appreciably different than a regular waffle…. Except.

That stuff that looks like whipped cream is yogurt.

The curled cones that look like extra waffle batter cooked until crisp aren’t batter at all - they’re Norwegian brown goat cheese rolled into cones. I was pretty worried about the goat cheese. I don’t hate goat cheese, but if you’re comparing any two cheeses and one of them doesn’t start with ‘cottage’, then I’ll probably like the goat cheese less. Norwegian brown goat cheese tastes like caramel, though. No, really.

It’s not as bad as it sounds and it actually goes really well with the maple syrup and berries.
And yes, it’s real maple syrup. Another nice touch.

Because the ship was moving, I knew that the infinity pool would be heated, so I headed back there. The nice thing about being 55 yrs old and the youngest passenger on board is that I often have the pools to myself. Today was no exception.

Notice the much lower water level - it’s not even close to the top of the plexiglass wall, so it’s not really an infinity pool today. They lower the water level when the seas are choppy enough for the pool water to slosh. Unlike the main pool, this pool has not much of a lip around it, so sloshing would get the deck wet with pool water.

I hadn’t been out there very long when it started to rain - and the rain was C-C-C-COLD! The air temp was around 11C and the rain was probably half that, plus wind chill. I decided that the main pool was a better bet, even though it wasn’t heated.

But… what’s this? The main pool was heated today, too! Hooray! Had a nice swim while everyone else just lounged in the chaise chairs, figuring that the pool was still ice cold. This is the first time they’ve heated this pool the whole trip, so no surprise nobody else was swimming.

One nice lady with an English/Aussie accent and purple hair talked to me briefly about it and I mentioned that the pool was heated today and she said, “Oh lovely!” In that English/Aussie accent, which was adorable.

I had to laugh at the signage on the edge of the pool, though. When a company who only deals with metric measurements tries to include imperial measurements for the Americans, sometimes it can get lost in translation.

I had to think twice before I could work out WHY “ 3’ 12” “ looked wrong to me. Funny.

At 5 pm, we headed to the Atrium. The singer we heard last night in the big theatre was doing an extra show for us in the atrium because we had a schedule change resulting in a second at-sea day and because she really wanted to play the $90,000 Steinway grand piano that sits in the atrium..

At last night’s show, she joked that every time she walked past it and saw the sign that said ‘don’t touch’, she felt like Donald Trump backstage at the Miss Universe pageant. LOL.

Anyway, her concert started at 6 and the ship pianist had a 45-minute set at 5, so we went down at 10 till 5 so we could snag a good seat.

Well…. Everyone else had the same idea!

We ended up on deck three looking straight down at the piano!

The ship’s pianist played lots of nice stuff, including the themes from Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones as well as some Broadway and other stuff.

I went down to deck 1 to grab a couple of martinis before the big show started and it was a madhouse down there

I brought the drinks up and then had a look at the display of traditional Norwegian costumes. Some of them are really beautiful.

Then we were treated to the lovely vocal and piano talents of Philippa Healey, who sang everything from Andrew Lloyd Weber to Pucinni to a song about passing wind. Our vantage point made it unique to say the least.

After the show, we had our first reservation at one of the upscale restaurants.

Most cruise ships offer a few upscale offerings when you tire of the main dining room and the buffet. On Viking, these are included at no extra charge. The number of bookings you get depends on the level of your stateroom, but once the ship sets sail, you can book as many times as you like to fill the empty tables.

And I’m thinking the hostess at the main dining room must’ve flagged our account about us liking to sit a bit away from the crowd, so they took us over to a little table against the window. There were two other two-person tables in our little alcove, but they were empty at the moment.

We both started with calamari, which was really nice, then Rob had a soup and I had the pasta special as the second course. It was fettuccini and some kind of meat sauce - I didn’t catch half of what the waiter described (accent + mask) so I really don’t know what I ate, but it was a riot of flavours and I sopped up every last bit of it.

Also: it looked like Frito pie. (For those unfamiliar, a Frito pie is corn chips covered in chilli and cheese. It’s delicious.)

About that time, who should they seat next to us but the purple-haired English/Aussie lady I met at the pool and her husband. We struck up a conversation with them, then they struck up a conversation with the couple on the other side of their table, who were from Memphis, Tennessee… I heard that lady say that they were Democrats - and I piped up and said, “You’re Democrats in Tennessee? Well, bless yer hearts!”

That’s like being a vegan at a steakhouse, I tell ya.

Anyway, the six of us had a grand time while we waited for the main course… Rob had a veal thing that looked like schnitzel and I had a rib eye steak rubbed with mushroom powder, brown sugar, and chilli flakes. Holy crap, was it ever good. It legit gave Longview a run for its money. (For those unaware, Longview Steakhouse in Longview, Alberta, Canada is about 90 minutes’ drive from our home in Calgary and it’s listed as one of the 15 best steakhouses on earth.)

I should mention that the upscale places also have upscale wines - both the red and white were from Italy (it’s an Italian restaurant, duh) and they were really nice. I’ll say that I haven’t had a ‘cheap-tasting’ glass of wine yet while on board.

And free refills!

We exchanged email addresses with the Aussie couple and we’ve invited them up for champagne some evening (we got a bottle included with the room and we haven’t opened it yet). They were fun.

In the meantime, we’ve pulled into the harbour at Molde, Norway - the substitute stop that replaced the Faroe Islands. I don’t know anything about it, but what I can see from the ship looks lovely.

Off the back of the ship (and you’ll pardon the dinginess of the shots, as it’s 11pm when I’m taking these) there’s a wee island and some nice fjord action happening.

And off the port side, the view from our stateroom is of the town and some big-ass yachts. There’s a lot of money floating in this harbour!

One quick note about Viking customer service… they handed out tickets for the shore excursion tomorrow. We’ve been booking the first one every morning, so we can get an overview of the area, then we have the rest of the day to go back to any place we’d like to see more of.

Well, our tour card said 2pm - the last tour of the day.

I took the tickets to the lady at the desk and explained that we’d prefer an early morning tour and she said she’d make a note and if someone else with an early one wanted later, she’d switch us. When we got back from dinner, our revised tickets were waiting for us. Nice.

Also: we’ve booked another cruise this fall with Viking and our time when we can book the shore excursions for that trip happens to fall in the middle of this trip. Right in the middle, actually, where we disembark at Bergen and end the iceland cruise, then get back on the ship in our new room for the Viking Homelands cruise from Bergen to Stockholm.

The hiccup with that is that the tours get booked up quickly and there are two in particular that we don’t want to miss out on - the cruise coordinator doesn’t usually handle shore excursions, but he said he’d book us an appointment for the scheduled time (9pm local time) and help us book our excursions. He even said that if he could get into the system early, he’d call us to get us in faster.

That’s the kind of service you don’t expect, but love to see.

(In case you’re wondering, the tours we want to snag on the next trip involve Petra, the Pyramids/Sphinx, and Jerusalem - but that’s a whole ’nother cruise and we’ll talk about that then)

For now, I’ll leave you with the ridiculous beauty of Norwegian fjords.