When we got back to Sky Princess after our morning’s excursion and early afternoon’s walk around a bit of picturesque Ålesund we dropped off our bags, freshened up a bit, then took advantage of the fact that Afternoon Tea was still taking place on the ship to grab something very light to snack on. There’s a reason for that. And look! There’s also photographic evidence of some of that very thing below!
Gee, Mark, thanks. A couple of sandwiches on a plate. That’s exactly what I came looking for when I searched online for pictures of the Norwegian port of Ålesund as seen from the Sky Princess cruise ship.
I aim to please, and then I turn around and fire in the opposite direction. It’s my way.
We returned to our balcony, ordered some drinks to be delivered to the room, grabbed our books, and waited for the sail away from Ålesund. We love having a balcony on a cruise ship for this very reason, and we love being able to have drinks delivered to us anywhere on the ship with Princess Cruises. It’s a terribly civilised way to depart a port that avoids all that mingling with other passengers on the top deck.
From the balcony we could see some other parts of the town that we’d likely try to check out if we were to return here on some other cruise. Despite its medieval stone look, the Ålesund Church was also one of the new constructions of the early twentieth century utilising some of the architectural styles of the time, as explained in the previous post in this travel series, and it would be nice to see that up close; and the Aksla Viewpoint on Mount Aksla (bit of a coincidence) holds some appeal if I ever feel brave enough to try to persuade Marie to make the 418 steps climb up there.
Ålesund is located at the entrance to the Geirangerfjord and benefitted from some beautiful rocky sights as a result. What else is new on a Norwegian fjords cruise? Geologists struggling to find a vacation that will satisfy the needs of family members who don’t share quite the same passion for geology as they do – there are more of them than you think – could do a lot worse than suggest a cruise on the fjords of Norway.
The final bit of Norway’s land mass that we passed on Sky Princess as part of this cruise was the island of Godøya to which we’d paid a visit first thing on this day in order to see the Alnes Lighthouse. That had been on the island’s northern side whereas we were passing to the south, but that made it interesting to see the mountainous form of Storhornet from the opposite side.
The open sea marked the start of the transit towards the next country on this cruise and the point at which we hit the shower and changed, ready for the evening.
I mentioned that there was a reason that we went for something light to eat when we got back aboard the ship and that reason was that we’d booked the Crown Grill speciality dining on the ship for that evening. Past experience told us to eat light beforehand, so that’s what we did, and we still felt full to bursting by the end.
All that remained after food was to take a drink back to the room to enjoy the sunset at close to midnight. It never got much darker than this and the sun would start to rise again very soon afterwards. That’s what happens when you cruise in the height of summer.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll spend a quiet day at sea heading from Norway to Iceland, and the views will be… not quite what we were expecting.