A busman’s holiday!! Part one!

Well actually, we’ve been on a boatman’s holiday. We left our little narrow boat in West Lancashire & headed off from Newcastle on a cruise to Orkney, Iceland & Norway. It was our first big cruise and we were quite overwhelmed by the size of the ship and how well almost 2000 passengers were catered for. There were numerous bars & restaurants, we were spoilt for choice. The most formal dress code was smart casual, in some of the restaurants, just up our street as we don’t have any formal attire at all!! 

The shows in the on board theatre were excellent and very varied. There was a guest opera singer on board who sung while we sailed away down our first fjord, and it echoed. Most times of the day there was a musician or singer performing in one of the bars or lounges.

We really enjoy sitting on our balcony watching the fjord scenery go by in our pj’s having coffee first thing or with a beer in the evening as we sailed away. Some ports had another cruise shipped dock too and in addition coach trips into these places made it very, very busy indeed. Most evenings when we went back to our cabin the stewardess had constructed an animal out of our towels!!!

We were very interested to watch how such a big vessel moored up. A small rope with a weight on was thrown to the dock crew, who caught it with a long hook. Then it took a couple of chaps to pull the huge ropes over the mooring bollards.

Our hearts were in our mouths as we watched the pilot getting on & off of his small tug type boat & onto ours as we entered & left ports. 

 

I was shocked how smooth the North Sea & Atlantic were, I was expecting much bigger waves & swell. Our weather was beautiful with only a few showers when we’ve been in dock, unlike at home, as we saw on the news the problems with Toddbrook Reservoir at Whaley Bridge, we spent our first few months when we moved onto Burnt Oak in that area.

There were lots of excursion to choose from, some whole day trips on a coach which we didn’t really fancy. So we did a couple of half day trips otherwise explored the ports of call ourselves.

Our first port of call was Kirkwall, Orkney and we’d arranged to go on a trip to Skara Brae which was wonderful, our tour guide was a local archaeologist who’d worked at the site and was very informative & entertaining.

I had contacted a shepherdess in Orkney before we travelled via Ravelry (knitting forum) and met her as she worked in the wool shop there. I was thrilled to be able to get some North Ronaldsay wool to spin & some yarn.