There won’t be a lot of writing on this post as it will mostly just feature photographs of the Swedish coastline as viewed from our balcony aboard the Island Princess cruise ship following our departure from Copenhagen during our 2022 Western Europe cruise. I’m pretty sure nobody visits this site for the writing, though.
We’d just had a lovely half day in the Danish capital and by the time we got back to the ship following our morning and afternoon of walking, exploring, and drinking in Copenhagen we were a smidge tipsy. Those beers may have been small but they packed a punch. Our immediate thoughts were that it made sense to have something to absorb some of the alcohol without filling us up too much, and since it was pleasant right at that point – it had been changeable all day in Denmark – we headed to the top deck of Island Princess for something from the lido grill.
From here on it was all about just relaxing in our room for a few hours, getting some drinks delivered (you don’t stop drinking once you start in the afternoon or you get a headache; that’s a scientific fact!), having a bit of a read, and waiting for, then stepping outside occasionally for, the sail away from Denmark northwards along the coast of Sweden towards our next port of call on this cruise.
I do like a nice wind farm, but who doesn’t? Gits who put profits before the planet’s future, that’s who. And people whose parents were abducted by wind farms when they were children, instilling a deep fear of the thrum of turbines ever since and a longing that won’t go away. I can excuse the latter group.
That changeable weather was on show with clouds bubbling up and hiding the sun on occasion, sometimes showering us for a minute or so, then passing quickly. Our balcony was on the starboard side of the ship which meant the sun was on the other side of the vessel, so when it started to rain in Sweden we saw evidence of it from our cabin in the form of a rainbow over the distant land. Thanks, physics!
As we cruised further north, so the sun sank in the west, and that brought a range of fantastic colours in the sky and clouds, even casting everything in shades of light purple at points. Light reflected from water at different wavelengths to produce rainbows, then light refracted through more of the atmosphere to change its wavelength all in the space of half an hour! What a treat! It was fantastic to watch Sweden passing by with completely different light from minute to minute.
To some people they’re eyesores but I do love the look of industrialisation. All those chimneys and warehouses, the silos and conveyor belts, the steam, the cranes. That’s what growing up on a steady diet of post-apocalyptic movies in the 1980s will do for you. Somewhere over there, I thought, there’s a gang of survivors barricaded while a biker gang looks to break in and commit horrible acts of violence on them, and maybe I’m the hero who arrives on a shiny, white ship to lead everyone to safety.
Again, we’d been drinking.
The narrowest point of the waterway between Denmark and Sweden was at the northernmost end so this is where we got closest to land. This was Helsingborg in Sweden, and if we’d been inclined to head up onto the top deck and gaze across in the other direction we’d have seen Helsingør in Denmark, and, more specifically, Castle Kronborg, that we’d visited on our first visit to Denmark a few years earlier. Clearly, as the photos will show, we weren’t so inclined.
For the rest of the evening it was the usual fare for us in the form of showers, changing, a little bit more drinking and entertainment, then dinner.
In the next travelogue in this Island Princess series of posts we’ll be making our second visit to Norway’s capital city in four months when we visit Oslo. We’ll also be taking the only excursion we booked at all on this cruise, which starts with a glass blowing demonstration that isn’t what we expected at all.