Haugesund, Norway

June 29
Well this was our last port before we disembark at Dover in 2 days.  The weather caught up with us.  I guess it is OK to now say that we had amazing weather for being so far north and at the Arctic Ocean. 
But today, it rained all day.  Albeit not hard, but with a blowing wind that made using an umbrella very difficult.  We have rain parkas, but since the ship said nice and warm weather today, we didn’t wear them.
The town is more modern than where we have been, but we had some fun.  We stumbled on a park.  A man was entering from a different path than we were on.  It was amazing to see that as he walked the pigeons were flocking to him.  We knew he was going to feed them, and so did they.
  can you tell the birds are flying in?

Yup they knew…..
                                                              
Right after he fed them, a flock of 8 year olds came into the park.  Most of the kids did everything they could to scare away the birds.  Screaming and running.  But one little girl kept holding out her forefinger and was chasing the birds to try and get one to land on her finger.  Very funny.
One of the kids that chased the birds 
We were taken by a shuttle bus into town.  It dropped us off at a church and would pick us up there for the return trip.  So we went walking around just looking.  We decided that instead of finding our way back to the church we might as well find our way to the ship…….bad idea.
We crossed a bridge, as the bus had, and walked toward the pier.  We saw the ship, not far away.  Great.  We are wonderful navigators.  There was one problem…..there was an arm of the fjord between us and the ship and unless we wanted to swim, there was “no way to get there from here”.
                                     
So we retraced our steps and headed back over the bridge and toward the correct bridge.  On the way we spotted the church.  So, yes, we took the shuttle back.
Here are some pictures of the town and, of course, a church. 
   Does this look much different than Norway?  Strange…
               
We saw the statue of the boy from a distance and we weren’t sure what he was doing.  So we went closer.  I guess he is holding a line of cod. 
                                                                 
The big statue is of a Viking.  What a wonderful head of hair….

Isn’t this an interesting playground?
                                                          
Finally, we got to see a sunset.  Yes, it is true, up until now we were really happy to NOT see the sunset, due to the midnight sun.  But it is also true, it was good to see a sunset again.  If I had stayed up, I would have seen the sunrise 3 hours later.