30 May 2019:
London, United Kingdom:
Through the Tower Bridge to Coastal Norway and Back

By Corey Sandler

Welcome aboard.

We’re off on the first of three loops in northern Europe, with wonderful London as our port of departure for each.

Silver Wind is one of a small number of cruise ships that are small enough to fit through the Tower Bridge (or to put it another way, not so huge that they cast shadows on the towns they visit.)

Here’s what we looked like on an earlier visit as we passed through the bridge in the night.

On this cruise we’ll enter the North Sea and stop at some of the resplendent settlements and fjords of southern and central Norway. Heading back, we’ll spend the day in Edinburgh, Scotland before coming back through the London Tower Bridge.

Here’s our plan:

Here’s Silver Wind tied up to the floating dock alongside HMS Belfast. We like that just fine.

All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com

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What I Did on My Winter Vacation:
In Living Color

By Corey Sandler

Even professional travelers need a vacation from time to time. And as I often tell people, when I am away I do not want to feel at home.

This winter we checked off one of the boxes on our to-do list. We have been to the far north many times, but this time we made a specific plan to revisit the top of Norway at the optimal time of year to view the Aurora Borealis.

The Northern Lights (and the Aurora Australis, the Southern Lights) are glowing almost all the time, but they cannot be seen in the daylight or when there is heavy cloud cover. In the winter the sun never rises above the horizon for six to eight weeks which gives a whole lot of dark.

And some places on our planet receive significantly stronger solar particles than others: the Aurora Zone is a belt that sits at roughly 70 to 80 degrees above or below the Equator. Too far north and the angle to the lights is too thin; too far south and the odds of seeing them are very slim.

One more thing: in the far north, March tends to have less cloud cover than earlier months in winter.

So we went to Norway for nearly a month.

Here is some of what we saw:

Northern Lights Near Tromsø. Copyright 2019, Corey Sandler. All rights reserved
Narvik, Norway. Copyright 2019, Corey Sandler. All rights reserved.
Snow People, Tromsø. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
Bergen in winter. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
Tromsø under a blanket. Copyright 2019, Corey Sandler. All rights reserved.
Landing at Oslo. Copyright 2019, Corey Sandler. All rights reserved.

Why I Travel. Copyright Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

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