From Here to There – A Move Across an Ocean

We cruised into Kristiansand, Norway and it was a beautiful sunny day.  

Our port time was short, only 7:45am – 2:15pm.  I had booked a Disney excursion here that was going to be riding a vintage steam train through the country side, but that ended up being cancelled due to not enough people signing up for it.  I was really bummed about that – I thought the girls would have really enjoyed riding on an “old timey” train.  So when we docked, I didn’t have anything planned, nor did I really know of anything to do here!  The girls were tired from Oslo and just wanted to stay on the ship – so MyMan and I got to enjoy the sites of Kristiansand by ourselves!

We came across a nice park that had some cool statues.

Plus it had this really big, awesome sand scultpure…

We made it into the actual town, which was pretty empty when we got there because it was still quite early.

Pretty flowers throughout the town were in full bloom!

This was an cool restaurant – the name of it was Food Asylum.  

Most McDonald’s don’t look like this!

Some other neat sites throughout the town.

We finally found a little cafe that had good wifi, so we grabbed some coffee and caught up with news and the rest of the world.

After a bit, we decided to find a park we had seen on the map.  It turned out to be a huge nature reserve type of place just on the edge of town.  It was absolutely gorgeous and so peaceful!  

Once we found our way out of the park, we were at the northern end of town, and the ship was at the southern end of town, giving us a good change to wander through the streets on the way back to the ship.

We strolled through Old Town.  The architecture is such that all the homes are connected for the entire block.  If looking down from above, you can see they have small courtyards in the center.

Then we came upon the cathedral in the middle of town.  The inside was beautiful.  We haven’t seen many cathedrals with as much wood as this one had.  It was such a simple elegance.

Closer to the port, we went to the Fish Market.

MyMan and I have never see so many live lobsters in one place before!  They had TANKS of them.  But when we went to many of the surrounding cafes and restaurants specifically looking for lobster on the menu – we couldn’t find any!!  

By now it was lunch time, and the fish market/wharf area was hopping with people.

And many people were enjoying their boats in such gorgeous weather!

We made it back to the ship and found the girls.  They had had a blast on the ship “being by themselves.”  Since we had to embark at such an early time, that evening was a Princess Meet and Greet, but the girls weren’t interested in getting autographs just then.  They had already gotten some of the autographs already.  But it was still neat seeing them all together.  The characters on the ship were always so nice and accommodating.

The rest of the day we all just relaxed and enjoyed the ship.  We had one more stop in Norway.

Tomorrow’s port….Bergen!