Hurtigruten Day 9

Hurtigruten Day 9

After going to bed at 2am I was not keen to be up and about at 7.45am for our call into Harstad. The time for our departure was 8.30am which doesn't give much time to get too far from the ship. The thing is if the ship is late getting in to port it still leaves at the designated time if all their unloading and loading is done.... you often don't get the full amount of time in port which is frustrating and tends to be happening on a regular basis.

I was woken in the process of docking so decided to go onto the open deck for the usual photo opportunity. Thankfully the sun was shining and the sky is blue so we are in for a nice day. All the Germans will be up on deck sunbaking!!

Later in the day at 2.15pm we had a stop at Stokmarknes for one hour but we were late arriving so that cut our time back to around 45 minutes. As everything is close at hand we were off the ship and walked a loop around the waterfront and back down the Main Street.... all done within the allocated time complete with pictures! Stokmarknes is where Hurtigruten was founded more than 120 years ago. There is a Hurtigruten museum but not enough time to visit. A lot of these towns are very small and around the harbour is where all the action is.

At 6.30pm we had a longer stop in Svolvaer. On the northern journey we had a 2 hour stop here so have seen most of the sights. We still took the opportunity to walk on land with Peter going to the museum and me just pounding the streets as most shops were closed.

Due to the time of our visit in Svolvaer our dinner time was brought forward to 5.15pm!!! We have never eaten our evening meal this early even with the grandies!

This made our scheduled repeat visit to Trollfjord at 5pm conflict with our dinner time. The spectacular Trollfjord is only 2km long and 100m wide. Luckily we cruised through the fjord on time which only made us slightly late for dinner.... mind you there was a very long line of people waiting to go into the dining room.... reminded me of the early dinner seating on Princess where they can't get in there fast enough. This time we had good reason as we had to be dined and off the ship by 6.30 to maximise our time in port.

The rest of the night was spent out on deck soaking up the sun and admiring the stunning scenery that we were cruising through. Just beautiful!

Day 10 of 12 tomorrow.