Friday, July 24, 2009

Voyage of the Vikings, Day 00 – Anticipation Day

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Today begins a new series of posts describing our recently completed North Atlantic cruise on the Holland American vessel Maasdam.

The boat left Boston on 25 July, 2009, turned around at Rotterdam on 11 August, and returned to Boston on 29 August, for a total of 35 days aboard. During the course of this journey we visited Atlantic Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, The Netherlands, Ireland, England & Wales, and the Farrow Islands. Our ports of call are shown on the map. Numbers adjacent to each port represent the day of the cruise when we called at that port.

Over the course of the next 35 days, we will post our day-by-day journals. The post date will be adjusted to reflect the actual date of the port visited, rather than the post date. We are doing it this way because we did not wish to spend all of our precious touring time posting blogs, and because, at the shipboard internet rates, it would have bankrupted us to do so.

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Holland America Cruise Vessel (HAL Promotional Photo)

One of the advantages to retro-posting is that we can report unequivocally that this trip was even better than we were expecting. While the weather wasn’t perfect, it was typical for the area, and the scenery was simply magnificent. Besides, what’s not to like about having someone make your bed every morning, feed you four excellent squares a day, and provide highly diverse activities and entertainment, ranging from scholarly lectures to game shows to song and dance. And above all, take you to interesting seaside locations for viewing from a 12 story tall floating observation platform, together with selected land tours.

Tune in again tomorrow, same time, same station for our first exciting day aboard.

1 comment:

donaldsc said...

Your use of a VHF receiver sounds intriguing. What brand and model did you have? What could you hear on it?

DON