Alesund, June 14

Yesterday evening the ship's doctor joined our table for dinner. He is an ER doctor from the big island of Hawaii who sails as a ship's doctor for several weeks to a month about four times a year. He is an excellent conversationalist, and we all enjoyed his company.

We lucked out on weather again today. It was cloudy and rather windy in the morning, but by the time our tour left at 12:30, it had cleared off a lot. It was a very nice tour to the nearby islands of Giske and Godoy through three very long undersea tunnels and another tunnel through a mountain plus a long high bridge. The first of the tunnels is the world's longest undersea tunnel.

Giske is a very flat island with only about 200 inhabitants. There we stopped at a very old (12th century) marble church with some fantastic decorative panels which had, at one time, been painted over, but when they went to clean them, they found bright colors underneath so managed to restore them to the original artwork.

Back through one tunnel to Godoy where there was a long mountain tunnel, one lane with several pull-outs for passing. Here we visited the village of Alnes and it's lighthouse which you can see here. Then back over the bridge and down through the other two tunnels to Alesund where our very skillful driver took us up Mt. Aksla for the gorgeous view of Alesund and Stor Fjord.

Alesund itself is very heavily Art Nouveau in style because it burnt almost to the ground in 1904. At the time of the fire, Alesund had about 1,000 wood houses and 10,000 inhabitants (it's population is about 40,000 today). Over 800 of the houses were destroyed, but with only one life lost, an old woman who had been rescued but tried to go back for something. Ironically, her house survived the fire. After the fire, no more wood houses were allowed in the city center, and everything was rebuilt in the Art Nouveau style which was popular at the time.

I may not be able to post as regularly for the next week or so. We will be going so far north that we will be beyond reception of the communications satellites located above the equator due to the curvature of the earthq. Also, the high mountains surrounding the fjords will cut off our signals from time to time. I will post as I can.