We reached the first port of call on our 2023 Britannia cruise to Norway with brighter and warmer weather than the last time we’d visited it. The port was Stavanger and our only other previous visit to it had been almost exactly ten years earlier on what had been only our second ever cruise. On that occasion we’d spent most of the day here in Norway on an organised excursion with just a little bit of time to ourselves to look around at the end, so this time we fancied doing it all ourselves.
If you’re on a cruise ship that visits Stavanger then you won’t have far to walk as the berths are right beside the old town area – Gamle Stavanger, as it’s known – and other interesting spots aren’t much further away. For us this meant we didn’t have to get up too early to make the most of our time in the port but we were still awake before Britannia had fully come alongside. We were able to watch plenty of cruisers disembark for tours or to head ashore early while we had a leisurely breakfast.
The old town area of Gamle Stavanger was where we wanted to head first. It’s impossible to miss with the ship docked right next to it, but if you do have any trouble then simply look for the largest grouping of white buildings.
We’d been to this part of Stavanger back in 2013 but we did have a specific reason for wanting to return to the cobbled streets and white, wooden-fronted buildings again. When we’d looked into the details of this cruise and mentioned it to my in-laws they’d scoffed at Stavanger’s mention and remarked that they’d been several times, it wasn’t very interesting, and there was a canning museum there that they’d stated was the most boring place they’d visited on Earth.
For us, though, this is the sort of thing we look out for. It might be boring. It might not. But doing different things or having good, old-fashioned, new experiences every now and then is all part of the joy that is travelling in general. And we’re very contrarian too. Tell us that something’s not worth doing and there’s every chance we’re going to try it. We’d made up our mind that the Stavanger canning museum would be the first thing we’d visit.
Something that hadn’t been ashore when we’d visited Stavanger before was the very colourful street art pictured below. Stavanger Houston was created by Houston-based artist GONZO247 in 2018, a gift from the Texas city that is twinned with it.
Being in Gamle Stavanger brought back a lot of fond memories from the 2013 cruise to Norway that had really cemented our love of this form of travel. It was great to see certain buildings and actually remember them, although I tried to snap some different types of shots on this occasion too. I enjoyed getting up close to the various mosses and other plants growing around the place.
One thing you’ll see whenever you look at anyone’s photos or videos taken from this historic area of Stavanger, though, particularly if they’ve cruised to Norway, is a shot of the cruise ship showing just how big it is compared to the buildings and how close it is to them too. I took almost the same photo of Britannia below as I did of Crown Princess the decade before and I can assure you that if we visit Stavanger in the future on another ship there’s every chance I’ll take the same shot again.
In the next post in this series I’ll show off some of the photos from our visit to both the canning museum and printing museum that was all part of the same complex and you’ll be able to find out whether we thought it was as boring as we’d been told to expect.