End of trip

Well all good things must come to an end. For us that meant getting off the ship in Trondheim and taking the train to Oslo. We did that in the grey of the morning of September 25th. We arrived early (no shock) and soon found out that our eight hour train trip was going to be broken up into a six hour train trip with a two hour bus ride. The reason was they were working on the tracks. Once we survived the chaos of the transfer to the bus, it went ok. We arrived in Oslo and walked to our hotel, the Thon Panorama. This was so different from the Thon Astoria we had stayed in earlier in the trip. Our room was huge and we even had a balcony. We debated on where to eat and ended back at Mamma's pizza, quick, good and cheap (at least for Norway, only $50 for two pizzas). Our next day came early as we had a 8:20 am flight. This meant we needed to be on the Flytoget (the train from downtown Oslo to the airport) early, like 5:00 am early. We made it fine and were waiting in our gate in plenty of time. The rest of the trip was with out a hitch but it was a long day. Our connecting flight was in Amsterdam were security was ridiculously tight. Barbara got pulled for special pat down and I had to take my camera apart as well have each iPad/Mac x-rayed separately. We finally landed in Dulles around 18 hours after we started. We thoroughly enjoyed our Global Entry pass as we breezed through customs and grabbed our luggage. From touch down to driving away was one hour and most of that was waiting on luggage and the bus to our car. Then another five hours drive home, arriving at 9:00 pm. At that point we had been traveling for 23 hours so we hit the bed hard.

Summary:

As I pointed out earlier, this was our first Hurtengruten trip and certainly our first trip on a coastal ferry. I can say 90% of it we very much enjoyed. The weather was great, the scenery fantastic, our table mates great company. We were befriended by a German couple that has invited us to their chateau in Croatia, that sounds pretty nice to me. Hurtengruten does a good job, very efficient. The number one thing I would change on a repeat trip would be getting on early versus late dinning. We are used to eating earlier and going to bed earlier and on a ship with no entertainment, we found the time from 6:00 to 8:30 could really seem to drag on. I don't recall selecting late but on future trips I would make sure I got early. The food was good through out the whole trip. I will say by the end I started to find it monotonous. The foods are geared to European tastes with little to no variety, particularly breakfast and lunch. I would have like to seen more done with eggs in the morning and salads for lunch. In general the foods were heavier then we usually eat (we found this the same in eastern Europe trips), often with sauces. Having said that, we were never hungry, had plenty to eat and did get to enjoy an all I could eat king crab buffet, yum!

The room and rest of the accommodations were fine. The crew was attentive but certainly different then an ocean cruise. We do have another cruise with Hurtengruten for Christmas of 2017 in Antarctica and look forward to sailing on the Fram for that adventure. In addition, I am very interested in their Iceland and Spitsbergen cruises so we will very much sail with them again. I would also consider doing a half leg (either going north or going south) in the winter to get to see Northern lights. I would highly recommend someone doing the coastal cruise at least once, the sights are to good to miss.