Friday, June 17th we docked at Bergen, Norway. The dock is about a half mile walk along the waterfront to the Bryggen wharf area. The ship passed some impressive bridges and zigzagged through open waters passing a lot of beautiful inlets and islands. 

Bergen is a cute town with some fun architecture. It has a population of about 286,000 and is situated amid seven mountains and faces the lovely Byfjorden (fjord). The city boasts many historic landmarks. 

Bergen has experienced a number of fires throughout its long history. The most recent during the German occupation during WWII. On 20 April 1944 a  Dutch cargo ship Voorbode, loaded with over 120 tons of explosives, blew up, killing at least 150 people and damaging historic buildings and destroyed much of the bay. It was fully investigated and found that it was not intentional due to the war, but was an accident. The city was subject to some Allied bombing raids during the war, aimed at German naval installations in the harbor. Some of these caused Norwegian civilian casualties numbering about 100.

We went on a 3-hour excursion: “Mount Floyen Funicular and City Drive”. We got soaked just walking from the ship to the bus. Then we got wet again after we took the Funicular up to the top of the mountain and walked to the souvenir shop and then again to a little restaurant, where John got a local beer.

Although we got some pictures, the view wasn’t that great because it was raining so hard. That is too bad because it would have been a beautiful view if it had not been raining. Mount Floyen has a 1,050 foot summit. 

After that we traveled by bus throughout the city. There were three stops to get out and take pictures, but because it was raining so hard we chose to stay on the bus instead and many of our pictures were taken through wet rainy bus windows. During a non-rainy day it would have been a fantastic excursion.  In the whole 43 day cruise this was the only one where the weather was bad enough to limit our experience.  I guess we were pretty lucky over all.

John attended the evening show: “80s Pop to the Max”.

The following photo was retrieved from Wikimedia: A nice view of the Fløibanen car Rødhette (Funicular) and Bay from the Summit ¹
Note: Rødhette translates to “Little Red Riding Hood”. There is also a Blue Funicular. called the Blåmann, translating to “Blue Man”.  I am not sure which one we rode on, perhaps both one coming up and the other going down.