Our boat

We went back to our hotel, retrieved our bags from the storage area, and went to the Radisson hotel a couple of blocks away. We were to take the 5PM bus to the Hurtigruten (name of our boat's company) dock which stopped at the Radisson. At 5:10PM, I asked the lady at the desk about the bus and she said we should probably just take a cab. There was another couple waiting, so we shared a cab and arrived to see this lovely ship awaiting our arrival. You can't see the name of the boat from these photos, but it was the MS Nordlys (Northern Light). We checked in and boarded, taking our little bags (big ones were delivered later) to Cabin 363. You can actually see the window of our cabin in the left photo. It's the last one (to the right) in the red stripe of the boat. This almost proved to be my mental undoing while in our cabin. Here's why -

on our second and third nights on the boat, Ivan and I were awakened at least once, one time we were awakened twice, at around 1:30AM by the loudest sound I have ever experienced in my life. I say 'experienced' instead of 'heard' because our whole cabin was vibrating and the sound was deafening. It was frightening. I had no idea what was going on and was unable to sleep for the duration of the sound - about 45 minutes. This happened on 2 of our 3 nights on board and Hurtigruten will be receiving a letter from me, believe me! That's all I'm going to say about this unfortunate series of events - suffice it to say that, unless I can get some sort of guarantee from them that we have a cabin at least 2 floors up and in the extreme forward part of the boat, we won't be traveling with this company ever again! Everything else - the staff, the voyage itself, the cabin (during the day) - everything else was just wonderful.