Geo: 55.6763, 12.5681All three of us slept very hard and quite well following the exertion of the previous evening. I heard loud thunderstorms during the night, but neither K nor Anna heard a thing. The skies were still gray, with very fast-moving clouds racing along the horizon as we all slowly got up. We were all pretty much packed and ready to go, so I left early to go retrieve our car from down the road. I was greeted in the hallway with a sign advising that the elevators were out of service, and that we should use the outside emergency staircase. I found my way down and out the side entrance, and stumbled across a bakery on my way to the car. I got some freshly baked, and seemingly appropriate danishes, along with some coffee, ... read more

Geo: 39.0095, -77.4647Once we cleared customs and immigration and entered the departures area of the airport, we saw a section we'd completely missed upon arrival. The airport had the largest and highest-end airport shopping I've seen anywhere outside of Dubai. The stores stretched across three terminals and ran the gamut from kitschy souvenirs to Hermes to Austin Martin cars. My only explanation might be the extraordinarily high taxes in Denmark, which might make duty-free shopping lucrative. Whatever the case, the airport offered plenty of opportunities to fill the few hours before our 12:20pm flight back to Dulles.The rain became consistently stronger as departure-time approached, and there were even passing thunder storms. While we boarded on time, we were soon advised by the pilot of a "technical issue," which though resolved within 20 minutes, meant that ... read more

Geo: 54.3227, 10.1359We knew we weren't due to dock back in Kiel until around 10:00am, so we were hoping to get off the ship as soon as possible and get up to Copenhagen, so as to maximize our very short window for sightseeing. Luckily we did not need to vacate our cabin until 9:00am, which worked out well, as we arrived into port early. We elected to walk off with our luggage, rather than have it delivered in the terminal, and were told to assemble in one of the lounges by 9:30am. We arrived early, which was good, as around 9:20 the announcement came that our group could leave -- first off the ship. There were zero passport or Customs inspections in the terminal, so it was our easiest and quickest disembarkation ever. We walked off, ... read more

Geo: 58.9644, 5.72626Our final stop in Norway was to be in Stavanger (sta-vaahn-ger), and our expectations were tempered given its title as the "oil gateway for Norway" and the belief that nothing could approach our experience from the day prior in Flam. We were wrong on both counts. Stavanger is fairly large, as Norway goes, with 125,000 people. Most of the oil industry is headquartered here. We'd expected to see it as large transit point for oil, but that was not the case. It is more the managerial hub for Norwegian oil. On our original flight to Copenhagen, SAS was touting their new non-stop flight linking Stavanger and Houston as "oil capitals of the world."The perfect weather from the day before held, and it was a lovely slow cruise into the very narrow cruise ship harbor, ... read more

Geo: 62.0855, 6.86769We continued across a high arctic plain, past impossibly deep lakes (including the deepest in Europe) and just below the lips of several glaciers. We stopped for lunch at a hillside lodge, from where we made an easy hike right to the top of a waterfall that cascaded all the way down to the valley floor below us.As we got lower and lower, and started to pass a series of small villages, the scenery took on an uncanny similarity to the Salzkammergut area of Austria, which is one of our most favorite places on earth. The tour made some obligatory stops for facilities, snacks, local lore, and of course shopping. We started to enter a series of very long tunnels through the mountains, which was the only way to reach Hellesylt and our ship. ... read more