Monday - day 4 - Kristiansand, Norway - part 3

Two earlier posts about Kristiansand can be found here:  https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2026/07/monday-day-4-kristiansand-norway-part-1.html

and here: https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2026/07/monday-day-4-kristiansand-norway-part-2.html

After we got back onboard, we decided to eat at the more casual Lido buffet. If we eat in the dining room, it takes about 2 hours to place our orders, be served, and eat, and then we end up missing the early show. We've skipped the shows a couple of nights, but thought we'd like to see this one...

It was a performance by Philippa Healey, who is a stage actress in London, having played Cosette (the adult version of the character) in Les Miserables in London. She was an amazing singer, humorous...

... and also is an amazing pianist.

Here's a video of part of her performance: https://youtu.be/7hs3MgxZdQU

We left the theater venue and went to one of the music venues where Mike Vitale was playing acoustic guitar. He had an interesting capability to lay down back-tracks for the song he was about to play, which made it sound like he had access to additional people playing percussion or other background music during the song -- but it was all performed right in front of us (not canned music).

We then walked across the hallway to another music venue where Steve and Gabriel were playing piano tunes.

We made our way upstairs to the Crows Nest Lounge and enjoyed watching the sun -- this was about 8:45pm.

We were heading about due west at this point.

Selfie in the Crow's Nest

It was quite a nice day in Kristiansand and on the ship!

Monday - day 4 - Kristiansand, Norway - part 2

Beginning of Kristiansand can be found here: https://journeyinamazinggrace.blogspot.com/2026/07/monday-day-4-kristiansand-norway-part-1.html

We wanted to visit the Kristiansand cathedral...

Cathedral from plaza outside

Main entrance

It turns out they were having an organ recital at 11am, and we got there about 11:15am.

We were allowed in during a break in the music.

The organist provided information about each piece before she played it -- note that the organ is front and center -- it could be moved from the side (where it probably is during services) to the front of the church during the recital.

Here is a video: https://youtube.com/shorts/4vAlmDXhuYM

After the recital, she invited us up to look at the console and to ask questions.

Pipes up in the balcony at the back of the church

We noticed this interesting ship hanging from the bottom of the balcony...

Close up of the ship

We asked Google Lens about it and found out:

Interesting that it was recently restored to "ship shape"!

Tourist information was housed in this building across the plaza from the cathedral.

In the old town, there are houses that still look the same as they had in the past - white-painted frame houses...

... very pretty and clean looking.

There was a "Troll train" in town - kind of like a hop-on, hop-off bus!

We saw a McDonald's, 7-11, and this Burger King as we were walking around.

We've been seeing a number of seagulls (I've told Carl that they have followed him from Dover, story posted earlier). This one is saying, "Thanks for the help! It's tiring to clean up the city alone..."

As we left the ship, we had seen this shipping container repurposed into a photo op location...

Information about moose in Norway

As we were heading back to the ship, we were looking for where it was plugged in. Usually the ship keeps its own power generation going while in port, but this port requested that they plug in and not run the engines (or run only clean-burning fuel).

Since we have to plug in at campgrounds, we wanted to see the power cords -- there were 4 of them, and each of them was probably 4 times the diameter of our 50A cord.

Ah yes, high voltage indeed!

Getting back on board... last post for Kristiansand coming later!

Monday - day 4 - Kristiansand, Norway - part 1

On Monday we arrived in Kristiansand, Norway. Gage had given us information about Kristiansand during his Sunday talk...

Gage's talk had told us that the town was very walkable from the ship.

We went to one of the upper outer decks to take some pictures -- of the town...

... looking out across the water.

We walked around the jogging track and found the information on how many laps make a mile.

We also found a couple of elliptical machines and we each tried them out.

The jogging track and the retractable roof over the pool area -- partially retracted.

Looking down into the pool area

We got off the ship to walk into town -- strong ropes / cables holding us to shore.

The theater in Kristiansand

A yacht pulled up outside the theater area -- it turns out that it is the royal yacht, the king and queen had also come in this morning, and some of our fellow passengers got to see them.

We walked through the fish market...

... various food options (the Norwegian Krona is worth about $0.10, so take 10% of the price for equivalent in US dollars).

Fish to buy to take home...

... more fish to buy (we cannot take any non-packaged food back onto the ship, so not for us).

Heads and fins for sale!

We walked on up toward town...

We had heard that the town burned many times in the past (frame buildings) - many built back with more durable materials.

A caravan (RV) -- we've seen a few of these van-type RVs. With the narrowness of the roads and small towns, you wouldn't want anything very large.

Pedestrian plaza and shopping

This is a fire hydrant (we thought it looked odd!).

More in another blog post...

Sunday - day 3 - Sea Day

Sunday was a travel day, erh, sea day. We had been looking forward to a day with no requirements to go and do anything!

After breakfast, we checked out a line dance class in the pool deck area.

Later in the morning, we went to the theater area to hear the travel guide, Gage, give a talk on the next three ports that we would be visiting.

Information about Norway

Since it was a sea day, we went to the main dining room for lunch -- this is a picture looking up to the second level within the dining room.

In the afternoon, travel guide Gage gave another presentation, this one on "Europe Up Close: Epic Solutions", in which he gave information about two innovative solutions that folks in Norway have come up with...

Setting the stage - Norway is 2/3 mountainous,

... and made up of 50,000 islands -- he shared "Norway's mainland coastline spans over 100,000 kilometers (including its 1,190 fjords and 50,000 islands), making it the second longest in the world after Canada."

But historically it has been hard to travel across the middle of the country -- so a journey between two of their major cities was quite a long journey around the coastline.

So Norway has lots of road tunnels (especially obvious when compared to much larger geographically US)...

...one of which is the longest in the world at 15 miles!

Gage talked about the building of the tunnel, which included a psychologist who worked with the designers to try to mitigate tunnel hypnosis (where you tend to fall asleep in tunnels when the appearance of lights coincide with your heart rate) and tunnel phobias (fear of tunnels).

Gage provided some interesting statistics on two tunnels that were built in about the same timeframe (Seattle Tunnel opened in 1999, Laerdal in 2000).

Gage then told us about another city in Norway, Rjukan, that would receive no sunlight from October to March due to being surrounded by mountains and its location in northern area. I am not able to open this web page from my browser, but I think it may have information about the process: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun

A picture of the Rjukan square with sun being reflected down into it.

We forgot to get pictures, but we also joined the Royal Dutch Afternoon Tea and sat with a wonderful older Dutch couple. They have been married 62 years and are 80 and 82 years old.

We joined Joe and Pat at one of the music venues for a performance by Vivace Strings -- they were doing songs from movies.

After dinner,

... when we returned to our room, our room steward had made us a towel elephant.

It was a mostly quiet day, and we enjoyed it!