nodnol
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2009
- Messages
- 562
Introduction: What, who, why
Hello! Welcome to this trip report about a cruise to Norway from June 6th to 13th 2015 on the Disney Magic – six months ago! Some might say „finally“, some might say „don’t bother anymore“, but I say: the timing is just right, at least we won’t torment you in the winter with pictures and tales of sunny beaches and delicious cocktails on tropical nights. You will be able to relate to our trip much better with sleet outside.
So, who are we? (in order of importance)
The travel journal
A gift from our terrific travel agent @brookelizabeth, about a quarter of it is filled with notes, the rest is full of blank pages. I agree, this doesn’t amount to much, but it also means I don’t have to rely completely on the pictures my sister took and on her excellent memory, which can memorize nearly everything indefinitely except Latin vocabulary. This was actually the first time ever that I kept on making notes after the fourth day of travel! So the journal is the reason, why I can write this TR at all.
The aforementioned sister @Flossbolna (in her own words and colour)
I am the person with the red jacket, not the ship!! The ship is called Magic, Disney Magic. So, we share an initial since my name starts with an M as well: Magdalene. Here on the boards I go by Flossbolna. I discovered cruising and especially Disney Cruise Line in 2013 and immediately fell in love with it! There are trip reports out there about my past cruising experiences together with my camera-shy boyfriend Michael because my sister demanded that those be written so that she would learn all about our trips. I love writing these trip reports, but sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed with how much work they are. So, when Katharina told me that she would write the trip report for this cruise, if I were the photographer, I was very excited!! I get to read a trip report about my own experiences!
Of the two sisters, I am definitely the bigger Mouse fan. And I am lucky that my boyfriend Michael has quite an interest in everything Disney as well. But we also love all other travel and are trying to get a good mix of Disney and non-Disney destinations.
Her travel companion – me
The little sister, who as very happy to be taken on a cruise! My first cruise ever as an adult! I must admit, I was very nervous about me being on a ship with thousands of other people. As I live in Berlin, I prefer getting out of cities for vacation, as fascinating and entertaining their architecture, art, history and food might be. It’s just easier for me to relax somewhere not as similar to home as every big city in a way is. I like to hike and my ideal vacation is not necessarily very far away. I travel quite a lot as most of my family and friends live at least a three hour journey away (most of them more). As we are on the disboards, I guess I should mention that my first trip meeting the Mouse was in 1992 to Disneyland, while on a 6 week trip across the U.S. with my sister. Not everything and everyone American I met on this trip was enjoyable, but I was complete taken by surprise by Disneyland, I hadn’t expected anything like it and enjoyed it tremendously: the detailed theming, the high spirits, the rides…
My usual travel companion is my husband, who unfortunately is not so much into Disney parks, at least until we’ve won the lottery. He joined us for the last weekend of this trip in Copenhagen, the only one of us who hasn’t been there before. But as he won’t participate actively in this trip report, he won’t get a proper introduction.
The why
We have been travelling together since high school, either with youth groups, on our own or with friends. We were always close and not only sisters but best friends, okay, maybe best friends after puberty, and enjoy travelling with someone with whom we share interests, taste, travel priorities (not that we don’t share any of those with our partners) and who most of the times instinctively understands as you can only understand someone with whom you have shared a bath tub when you were a kid. Because of the mentioned partners and residing in different parts of Germany, our outings have become a lot less frequent in the past years.
So it was high time to go on a longer trip together and as Flossbolna had discovered DCL she wanted to treat me to a very special trip for my birthday: a Disney cruise! Unfortunately it is not so easy for me to take vacation time in spring or autumn and in the summer I also wanted to travel with my husband. We pondered about a cruise in Europe or about flying to the U.S. and going on a cruise there, the dates of most of the European cruises that appealed to Flossbolna didn’t work but we were also hesitant about a transcontinental flight for only a week of vacation time. I suggested the Fjord cruise, as I have never been to Norway and was always fascinated by pictures of the nature of this country. So we checked and the dates seemed doable even with an attached weekend in Copenhagen, where we could reminiscent about our first Scandinavian holiday in the 1980s and about our fiasco biking holiday in the 1990s, when the tent drowned. And flights to Copenhagen are a lot cheaper than to the U.S.
And it was a great trip! (I’m sorry for the spoiler to those of you, who expected us to drown – again!) Thank you very much, dear sister, for sharing your enthusiasm for Disney and cruising with me! I enjoyed it enormously, still reminisce about it. When is our next trip??? Oh, I hope soon!!
So that’s my (short) story, Flossbolna can elaborate…
I was really not so sure about booking this cruise at all in the beginning! We booked the cruise in March 2014, which was between my first and second cruise. One thing I had loved about my first cruise, a 5-night cruise on the Wonder out of Miami to Cozumel and Castaway Cay, was the warm weather, the tropical beaches and watching the blue seas from the open decks. My idea of a cruise to Norway was that we would be cold and miserable and that this would really diminish the whole cruising experience. If we would do a European cruise, I had thought that we would do a 7-night cruise in the Mediterranean or possible a repositioning cruise between Dover and Barcelona. I was not thinking Scandinavia.
Just to give you some perspective: our southernmost port in Norway would be Bergen, which is at a latitude of 60° 23’ North. If you would go on an Alaska cruise, the northernmost port would be Skagway, which is at 59° 29’ North. Yes, there is a difference between Norway (actually all of Western Europe) and Western North America called Gulf Stream (warm water coming across the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico), which makes anything in Europe slightly less freezing cold than it should be according to its latitudinal location. Still, Norway is not where you go to get a nice tan and lie at the pool! It’s the place where frozen things don’t have to wonder what they do in summer… They stay frozen! ;-)
Anyway, Katharina was keen on the Norway cruise, I wasn’t. But it seemed a sensible choice, so I started to look more into where we would actually go. And then I checked out the different ports and started to Ohhh and Ahhh. Those places looked amazing. Maybe I could indeed compromise on the weather… And soon enough I was just really excited about our choice! The Disney geek in me was additionally excited that this would be an “inaugural” sailing as no Disney ship had ever gone to Norway and we would be on the first Norwegian cruise ever!
Next: Cast off! minus 2 days – The first travel day for one of us
Hello! Welcome to this trip report about a cruise to Norway from June 6th to 13th 2015 on the Disney Magic – six months ago! Some might say „finally“, some might say „don’t bother anymore“, but I say: the timing is just right, at least we won’t torment you in the winter with pictures and tales of sunny beaches and delicious cocktails on tropical nights. You will be able to relate to our trip much better with sleet outside.
So, who are we? (in order of importance)
The travel journal
A gift from our terrific travel agent @brookelizabeth, about a quarter of it is filled with notes, the rest is full of blank pages. I agree, this doesn’t amount to much, but it also means I don’t have to rely completely on the pictures my sister took and on her excellent memory, which can memorize nearly everything indefinitely except Latin vocabulary. This was actually the first time ever that I kept on making notes after the fourth day of travel! So the journal is the reason, why I can write this TR at all.
The aforementioned sister @Flossbolna (in her own words and colour)
I am the person with the red jacket, not the ship!! The ship is called Magic, Disney Magic. So, we share an initial since my name starts with an M as well: Magdalene. Here on the boards I go by Flossbolna. I discovered cruising and especially Disney Cruise Line in 2013 and immediately fell in love with it! There are trip reports out there about my past cruising experiences together with my camera-shy boyfriend Michael because my sister demanded that those be written so that she would learn all about our trips. I love writing these trip reports, but sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed with how much work they are. So, when Katharina told me that she would write the trip report for this cruise, if I were the photographer, I was very excited!! I get to read a trip report about my own experiences!
Of the two sisters, I am definitely the bigger Mouse fan. And I am lucky that my boyfriend Michael has quite an interest in everything Disney as well. But we also love all other travel and are trying to get a good mix of Disney and non-Disney destinations.
Her travel companion – me
The little sister, who as very happy to be taken on a cruise! My first cruise ever as an adult! I must admit, I was very nervous about me being on a ship with thousands of other people. As I live in Berlin, I prefer getting out of cities for vacation, as fascinating and entertaining their architecture, art, history and food might be. It’s just easier for me to relax somewhere not as similar to home as every big city in a way is. I like to hike and my ideal vacation is not necessarily very far away. I travel quite a lot as most of my family and friends live at least a three hour journey away (most of them more). As we are on the disboards, I guess I should mention that my first trip meeting the Mouse was in 1992 to Disneyland, while on a 6 week trip across the U.S. with my sister. Not everything and everyone American I met on this trip was enjoyable, but I was complete taken by surprise by Disneyland, I hadn’t expected anything like it and enjoyed it tremendously: the detailed theming, the high spirits, the rides…
My usual travel companion is my husband, who unfortunately is not so much into Disney parks, at least until we’ve won the lottery. He joined us for the last weekend of this trip in Copenhagen, the only one of us who hasn’t been there before. But as he won’t participate actively in this trip report, he won’t get a proper introduction.
The why
We have been travelling together since high school, either with youth groups, on our own or with friends. We were always close and not only sisters but best friends, okay, maybe best friends after puberty, and enjoy travelling with someone with whom we share interests, taste, travel priorities (not that we don’t share any of those with our partners) and who most of the times instinctively understands as you can only understand someone with whom you have shared a bath tub when you were a kid. Because of the mentioned partners and residing in different parts of Germany, our outings have become a lot less frequent in the past years.
So it was high time to go on a longer trip together and as Flossbolna had discovered DCL she wanted to treat me to a very special trip for my birthday: a Disney cruise! Unfortunately it is not so easy for me to take vacation time in spring or autumn and in the summer I also wanted to travel with my husband. We pondered about a cruise in Europe or about flying to the U.S. and going on a cruise there, the dates of most of the European cruises that appealed to Flossbolna didn’t work but we were also hesitant about a transcontinental flight for only a week of vacation time. I suggested the Fjord cruise, as I have never been to Norway and was always fascinated by pictures of the nature of this country. So we checked and the dates seemed doable even with an attached weekend in Copenhagen, where we could reminiscent about our first Scandinavian holiday in the 1980s and about our fiasco biking holiday in the 1990s, when the tent drowned. And flights to Copenhagen are a lot cheaper than to the U.S.
And it was a great trip! (I’m sorry for the spoiler to those of you, who expected us to drown – again!) Thank you very much, dear sister, for sharing your enthusiasm for Disney and cruising with me! I enjoyed it enormously, still reminisce about it. When is our next trip??? Oh, I hope soon!!
So that’s my (short) story, Flossbolna can elaborate…
I was really not so sure about booking this cruise at all in the beginning! We booked the cruise in March 2014, which was between my first and second cruise. One thing I had loved about my first cruise, a 5-night cruise on the Wonder out of Miami to Cozumel and Castaway Cay, was the warm weather, the tropical beaches and watching the blue seas from the open decks. My idea of a cruise to Norway was that we would be cold and miserable and that this would really diminish the whole cruising experience. If we would do a European cruise, I had thought that we would do a 7-night cruise in the Mediterranean or possible a repositioning cruise between Dover and Barcelona. I was not thinking Scandinavia.
Just to give you some perspective: our southernmost port in Norway would be Bergen, which is at a latitude of 60° 23’ North. If you would go on an Alaska cruise, the northernmost port would be Skagway, which is at 59° 29’ North. Yes, there is a difference between Norway (actually all of Western Europe) and Western North America called Gulf Stream (warm water coming across the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico), which makes anything in Europe slightly less freezing cold than it should be according to its latitudinal location. Still, Norway is not where you go to get a nice tan and lie at the pool! It’s the place where frozen things don’t have to wonder what they do in summer… They stay frozen! ;-)
Anyway, Katharina was keen on the Norway cruise, I wasn’t. But it seemed a sensible choice, so I started to look more into where we would actually go. And then I checked out the different ports and started to Ohhh and Ahhh. Those places looked amazing. Maybe I could indeed compromise on the weather… And soon enough I was just really excited about our choice! The Disney geek in me was additionally excited that this would be an “inaugural” sailing as no Disney ship had ever gone to Norway and we would be on the first Norwegian cruise ever!
Next: Cast off! minus 2 days – The first travel day for one of us
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Look forward to hearing all about it.
Norway in May ... I hope you plan on taking hats and mittens!
