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!