Back in the Norwegian Sea, heading south

    We've rounded the bend at the top, left the Barents and re-entered the Norwegian Sea. The mountains have gotten big and the houses colorful again. The ferry line has 13 major ships making the north / south trip. One leaves every day, so at least daily we pass one of the other vessels and you can tell the crews all know one another.

   There's a special thing my ship (Nordkapp) does every time it passes the Finnmark, the crews on both try to get as many passengers out to wave at the other. The crew also has banners they hang and last night there was also pot banging and even firehoses involved. It's 3 minutes of craziness and then it's over. When the Finnmark was pulling away you could see how far it had listed over to one side because everyone was crowded on their port side.

   Today we visited Hammerfest again, last time was at 5:45 am so this trip there were people in the streets and the church and museum were open. They also have their own Polar Bear Club on the pier, you can join just by walking in and giving them 100 kroner. They have over 100,000 members (in a town of 15,0000) but other than getting to wear a special pin, I'm not sure what special privledges go with that.

   I had a blog posting comment about calving glaciers, I don't think they're a problem at all up here. There aren't any big glaciers open to the sea. But further south near Geirangar there was a major tidal wave years ago when huge rocks slid into the fiord. The wave washed away a few houses.

   Speaking of comments, I love the ones that folks have sent in. It's nice to hear from friends and family back home. It was also so extremely nice of Steve C. to have such special concern for my fellow passangers, the last picture today is to ease his troubled mind.