Petrels at sea

My GPS seemed to think we were walking on water at lunch today. That reminded me of a recently-learned useless fact: that petrels (sea birds) are called that because they seem to run along the top of the water like St. Peter. So we must be a pair of petrels. Or a boat-full.

We boarded the MV Prinsendam yesterday at Dover, bound for Amsterdam via Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Shetland Islands and Edinburgh. It's a Holland America Line ship, but our fellow passengers include fewer elderly whiners than usual because the destinations are so adventurous. There are even a few kids!

It's a nice old ship. Our cabin is positively huge, especially considering we're paying just about the cheapest fare (we don't mind the lowest deck, but we do insist on having a view of the outside). She was built about 20 years ago for a Norwegian line that was bought by Holland America, so the layout is quite different from what we're used to. She's also quite small, with not quite 1000 passengers. So far the food has been just a notch less superb than we've had on other cruises and the crew is just a little less experienced, but the next three weeks look quite promising all the same.

The week or so in England was, as usual, a good experience all told. The weather was the pits, cold and rainy most of the time. We even had to stay indoors one afternoon because the rain was bucketing down. But we still managed to see a few new bits of England. Penzance, and Cornwall in general, made a great impression - scenic little villages beside the ocean, fishing boats, standing stones and all kinds of delights. And almost no North Americans! Most tourists were English, with some Germans and Dutch thrown in. Some day we must come back and spend a week or two.

We had a little more than a day in Dover, too, to see the white cliffs and other exotic sights. Dover's history goes way back. The Romans landed thereabouts and fortified the cliff east of town - the castle they began turned into a major structure under the Normans and was still being used in WW II. Even before the Romans it was an important port. The museum has an excellent display of the oldest sea-going boat ever recovered, a 3500-year-old wreck found in a hole being dug for a new road near the waterfront. They did an amazing job of restoring it and displaying it with lots of information and interactive stuff to do about the Bronze Age.

Dover still shows signs of the intense bombardment it endured during WW II. You can see the coast of France from the cliffs above town, and there were guns that could fire that far. Made life pretty hard for the people, but those English are tough souls. I was moved to tears by the memorials in St. Mary's church in the center of town - memorials to the people who manned the little ships to rescue the troops at Dunkirk, to the fishermen and others who turned their boats into minesweepers and died by the hundreds, and to thousands of others who died in the Channel during war or peace. It's not been an easy place to live. And now it seems to be going through tough economic times with the Channel tunnel taking away a lot of ferry business. That's probably why they're turning it into a cruise port, and it makes a very good one. Close to London with good train and road connections, but not so close that it's part of the huge congestion around the city. So good luck to them.

Tomorrow we arrive in Oslo. Ron and I will be taking a train across Norway to see the scenery inland. We hope, all going well, to catch up with the boat again in Bergen. Fingers crossed!