Spotty internet

 Well I will attempt to update the blog. As I looked at the calendar and realized we have been on the ship for 5 days. Yesterday was a sea day and I updated the blog only to have it not save. So I will try again today.  We are currently in the town of Gdańsk Poland.  What is funny is our phones don’t seem to find this location to give us the weather.  Supposedly it was to be 80 degrees today but we woke up to rain. It seems to be lifting some and we are hoping for good weather since we are on an all day tour to Malbrok Castle. 

The ship is fairly full at 700 passengers instead of the 930.  The service seems over the top. Everyone  has been overly attentive and friendly always wishing a good day or asking if they can help us in any way. We have a female cabin steward which is a first.  Prior to leaving home in April we picked dinner reservations for specialty restaurants although there were some difficulties getting a reservation we plan to eat at one of the specialty restaurants on the first night. The ship does not leave Stockholm until the next day at 2pm. We do have a tour booked for the morning to Drottingham Palace which is the current residence of the King and Queen of Sweden. 

Since the ship leaves today the weather is glorious seems all our travel days are like that.  The palace was okay not as nice as some we seen but the history was interesting. We were able to take a boat back to the ship so it was a chance to see some of the Stockholm islands that make up the city. 

The next port of call was Mariehamn. This is a small island that belongs to Finland. Viking is upgrading some of their excursion options to include more active choices such as 3 mile hike, long bike rides, and kayaking of course we didn’t chose any of those.  Mariehamn did have a 4 masted sailing ship and associated museum that could be toured. Dan spent 2 hours on the ship and 90 minutes in the museum only leaving because he was “hungry”.