Wednesday - day 6 - Sandnes/Stavanger, Norway

On Wednesday, we arrived at Sandnes, Norway. While Sandnes is a fast growing city, Stavanger, about a 40 minute bus ride away, has more interesting places to visit.

We arrived at Sandnes port...

... but decided to take the bus to Stavanger.

We walked through Gamle Stavanger (old town) -- lots of cobblestone streets...

...to get to the canning museum (combined with the printing museum).

The printing museum was combined with the canning museum because printing labels for the cans was an elaborate process.

We learned a number of things in the printing museum, including that, in the 1500s, a printed hymn book cost half a cow and a Bible cost three cows!

They had an activity for children to assemble a book, which I tried doing!

Some of the lithograph printed labels on sardine cans

Examples of cans used

Sardines were primarily packed in these smaller rectangular cans.

One of the workers at the museum, Lisa, gave us a tour through the canning museum area -- this was an oven where the fish would be smoked.

An area where we could try our hands at packing sardines (rubber ones) into cans.

A device that was used to cut the heads off the sardines after they were smoked.

The cans were filled with oil so the product could be sterilized in a machine like a pressure cooker.

The machine next to Lisa attached the tops to the cans. Sardine canning had to have specialized equipment to seal the cans as the cans were rectangular.

As it turns out, Stavanger is no longer canning sardines. Various economic factors in the 1980s caused demand to drop and even combining all the canneries into a single business did not resolve the pricing pressures that they were encountering. So the canning operation was moved to Poland.

This is a company that catches sardines in Norway, sends them to Poland for processing (using the Norway process of smoking the sardines) and canning, and then sends the finished product back to Norway, and out to the world.

We walked down to the harbor area of Stavanger -- there was a Costa cruise ship at the dock (no picture of it) -- much larger ship that ours. We figured Holland America gets a cheaper rate docking at Sandnes (follow the money).

As we headed back to the bus stop, we stopped off at Stavanger Domkirke (Stavanger Cathedral), Norway's oldest cathedral still in continuous use. It was founded around 1125 and completed around 1150. There was an admission charge to go inside, and we were rather pooped, so we elected to head on to the bus.

East end of the cathedral

We had a good time visiting our last stop in Norway.

Tuesday - day 5 - Eidfjord, Norway

Tuesday's cruise plan was that we would be cruising up Hardangerfjord for a number of hours to get to Eidfjord. I think we heard that the pilot would be joining our ship at 1am to ensure that we made it safely up the long fjord. There was to be commentary on the trip in the Crow's Nest (deck 12, forward) and the bow area on deck 5 would be open for us to be outside from 7am onward. 

We decided to order room service and have it delivered at 6:45am so we'd be up and going. It actually arrived at 6:40am, and it did help us be ready to go more quickly.

We initially went to deck 5 to go out on the bow. It was cloudy and damp. You may be able to barely see a bridge crossing the fjord ahead of us. This road bridge is only about 1/2 meter (1.5') higher than the highest part of our ship; other larger cruise line ships can no longer go to Eidfjord.

Along the banks, we saw small communities, many growing some type of crops.

Our ship's travel guide, Gage, said that these communities may only have a few families, and whatever they grow is for the use of their community, not sold outside the community.

We headed up to deck 14 to be up as high as possible as we passed under the Hardangerbrua (Hardanger Bridge).

The bridge comes out of mountain tunnels on both sides, so building it required drilling the tunnels through the mountains, stopping high above the fjord, and then building the bridge out from the tunnels.

It looks like it made it over the navigation equipment in the front!

And it made it over the smokestacks in the back too! Whew!

Looking forward down the fjord

Another small community along the side

Eventually we came to Eidfjord at the end of the fjord.

We were told that the community had only 962 residents, so we would more than triple their population for the day!

From our veranda, we enjoyed watching the folks (local from the town) tying up our ship -- at the back, they got the line to the motorboat and the motorboat carried the line over to the folks on the land. You may also notice that there is a caravan park (RV park) just in the upper right corner of the picture. We saw a lot of caravans (mainly class B (vans)) in town as we visited.

In the front, they were able to get the lines over to folks who were near the cleats where it would be tied up.

The ship docked at about 10am, so we decided to eat on the ship before going in to town.

Using the online app, we could order burgers and fries from the "Dive-In" eating place near the pool -- and they were ready soon after we got there after walking from our room.

When we got off the ship, we didn't have any particular plans -- we saw a large piece of machine equipment in a square in town and went over to look... 

 

There was information about hydroelectric power in this area...

...and about the large metal object we had seen...

Carl in front of the Peloton runner

Our ship from town

We decided to walk up to see the old church -- along the way, we passed the newer church.

Eidfjord old church

The old church

Built around 1309!

There was a barrier that prevented us from going in to the church, but we took a picture. 

View of the church from behind and lower down as we walked back toward town.

As we got back near the pier, we saw a Thai food truck!

The food truck was in the parking lot of a grocery store. We went in to look around. The grocery had not only grocery items, but a small section of hardware, drug store items, and, I think, the post office. One stop shopping!

As we headed back to board, Carl thought that the "TuristInformasjon" sign was funny!

After dinner, we went back up to the Crow's Nest to watch our progress leaving the fjord -- it was still overcast, but beautiful.

We went to the late show (8:30pm) of Darius Uhl, cellist...

... he did a good show!

Back at our room, Carl out on the veranda, 9:26pm.

A waterfall coming down from the glacier (way up on top of the mountains)

We enjoyed our scenic journey in Hardangerfjord and visit to Eidfjord.