We had a mostly restful night – with bouts of waking up due to the time change. Once we were up and about, we enjoyed breakfast in the downstairs hotel restaurant. They put on a nice buffet with lots of choices. We sat near the window where we watched the local folks hurrying to their work days. I was surprised to see so many folks on bicycles – and a lot of folks walking around with earphones, listening to music.
After breakfast, we decided to walk over to the “Old Towne” section of Stockholm. It was only about a 7-minute walk from our hotel.
There were many narrow cobblestone streets, lined with shops and restaurants. It was interesting to look at the old buildings and statues and such. Most of the shops had the same general selection of touristy stuff and we didn’t find anything that interested us.
A short video of the square area
After our visit to Old Towne, we walked back to the hotel, and it was time to get ready for our bus transfer to the cruise terminal. There were quite a few folks at our hotel (about 3 bus-loads full) who were on our cruise.
After about 30 minutes on the bus, we arrived at the terminal. It was a different embarking process than we are accustomed to – they checked our passports just after the security check point, and then directed us on-board. So we embarked on the SS Voyager. Once on-board, we were directed to the theater, where they had an assembly line of folks checking people in.
We were given our cruise card/ID cards and invited to walk around the ship and have some lunch while we waited for our room to be ready. Around 2:30 pm, they announced that the rooms were ready, and we went to our room to check it out. Our luggage was already in our room, and we had a nice stack of documentation to go through, explaining about the ship, and our tickets for our excursions. It’s a nice room, with balcony. We only have a few small complaints about the room – that are really trivial. 1. The remote control for the TV doesn’t work very well, and 2. There really are not enough regular sized drawers for our clothing and possessions. The balcony is much smaller than other ships we’ve been on, but we are in a cold location, and don’t expect to be spending a lot of time on the balcony, so it’s adequate.
Here’s an experiment – Adam got a Samsung 360 camera for his birthday, and took some 360 images of the room – my apologies if they don’t work – we can view them just fine from one computer, but not from another….
After a short time of unpacking and getting situated the Muster drill was called. This too, was different than other ships we’ve been on. Not only did we have to gather all in the Muster Station area, but we then had to walk in single file, out to where our assigned Lifeboat was located – and line up in a compact formation for inspection. Once they were happy we understood the safety protocol, we were excused to enjoy the rest of our evening on-board.
Sail away was shortly after the Muster drill, and then we explored the ship and had a nice early dinner. We always like to sit at bigger tables, sharing with other passengers so we can hear stories about other folks’ experiences. And this was no exception – we had a nice dinner with nice folks. After dinner, we decided we were still a little jet-lagged so we headed back to the room and went to bed early.
We set our alarm so we’d be ready for our first port – Helsinki Finland.