I did a post on the Norwegian coast already. That post had major and common scenery photos. This post will have small things that we saw or did but I hope to show that there is lots of little stuff to see on this trip.

The Bodo landing strip is in the first photo. Norway might have more tunnels and bridges than any country on earth but they also have boats and planes. Flat land however is in short supply on many sections of the Norwegian coast. I’m sure that they put their runway in the best place they could. But a plane probably couldn’t land when a ship like ours was passing by. Our upper deck was well above the elevation of the runway.

Did I mention that they catch a lot of cod in Norway? They do. They call cod “white gold” in Norway. They have been catching and drying cod for 500 years in Norway. Cod is often dried unsalted, so it’s dried by cold air and wind on wooden racks. Dried fish has a storage life of several years. We saw cod drying on huge A-frame racks that must have gone on for over 100 yards, especially right along the harbor. The drying rack in the second photo was just a small section of a very large set of racks in the small town of Svolvaer. We saw these drying racks in many towns along the Norway coast.

We cruised through a number of narrow openings on our trip but none any narrower than the straight in the third photo. We would not have even seen this one since it was after midnight but since we were north of the Arctic Circle, it was daylight 24 hours. It gives a good idea of how steep and deep are the Norwegian fjords.

Our ship, the M.S. Nordkapp, was a freighter. That made for an interesting trip up the coast of Norway. We stopped up to six or eight times a day. Sometimes, our ship stopped three or four times at night. The ship would offload freight and take on freight. Often times, there was no opportunity for us to get off the ship. The good news was that our ship went to lots of ports that normal Cruise ships aren’t allowed to enter. Not that it was always exciting but it did give us a glimpse into the quieter side of Norway. You can see our freight stop in Havoysund in the fourth photo. And since it was not an exciting or important stop along our way, I included Vicky to spice up the photo.

While the M.S. Nordkapp was a freighter, it does carry passengers and it does have some amenities. You can see Nora, Pete and I enjoying a drink and a front row seat on whatever we were passing at the moment. As I recall, after our drink, Vicky and I hit the hot tub. We were not suffering riding on a freighter. Nice.