Final Thoughts, Viking Homelands trip and Iceland

Iceland. 🇮🇸 The Land of Fire and Ice is a most appropriate name for this spectacular country! One amazing spectacle of nature after another made our eyes grow wide, and our knowledge and appreciation of the world grow deeper. Favorites: the people- f...

Scandinavia, Day 14 - Bergen, Norway

We started our last day trying to change our panoramic tour of Bergen to the walking one. It was full, and they wouldn’t let us on. Boy, were we lucky! Bergen is the second largest city in Norway, covers about 180 square miles, and has a population ...

Scandinavia, Day 13 - FlĂĄm

Question— how many times can you look at scenery and ooh and ah and not get bored? All day and beyond, if you are in the incredible fiords of Norway! In a little village called Flåm ( the å is pronounced somewhere between "oo" and "oh"), founded in 1...

Scandinavia Day 12 - Stavanger, Norway

The area around the town of Stavanger (pronounced sta-VAN-ger) is known for two things: it is the center of the Norwegian oil industry, one of the most important segments of the country’s economy, and it is the location of arguably Norway’s best known ...

Scandinavia, Days 10 & 11–Oslo, Norway

( long) A little glitch today made a couple of plans more difficult, but in the grand scheme of things, did not affect us too much. Oslo is the only port on this cruise, aside from the beginning and end, in which the ship overnights. For our first da...

Scandinavia Day 9, - Ă…lborg Walking Tour and Pampering

Our early morning tour of the city of Ă…lborg was lovely. It was history oriented, of course, but our guide, a young Mom who was somewhat recently graduated gave us a nice background of what it is like to live here. Ă…lborg is the 4th largest city in D...

Scandinavia Day 8– Copenhagen

Still recovering from our 15,000 step day in Berlin, we lined up to take our Copenhagen on Foot tour at 9:30. Copenhagen is Denmark’s capital and is also the gateway to the rest of Scandinavia. Today’s weather was a perfect 10, a fact which made us a...

Scandinavia Day 7 - Berlin, Part 2

(Continued) A policy of modern Germany is to commemorate victims and resistance and to not glorify conquests. A stark example is a monument with a single sculpture Mother with Dead Son from 1937 in remembrance of the First World War. Lee led us on a m...

Scandinavia Day 7 - Berlin, Part 1

(Split into two posts due to length) We were up at 5:30 for an early morning 2.5 hour train ride from our ship docked in WarnemĂĽnde, Germany to Berlin. Viking arranged for a private train to bring its travelers to Berlin for what turned out to be a ver...

Scandinavia, Day 6 – Bornholm

This was a relaxing day, as we expected it would be. We didn’t dock in the small Danish island of Bornholm until noon, so we used the morning to try to catch up on our blog and attend a lecture on Cabarets in Berlin from 1920-1940. The second was enj...