Experience: No(r)way!? Part 3 - Stena Saga and other fun places

 This is the 3rd part of a trip report. Part 1  Part 2

Following the amazing experience, it was right to take a few days off and chill and enjoy life in Fredrikstad (as well as grow a new jawbone to replace the one I lost in Flåm), though those few days did include a quick trip to nearby Sarpsborg with a visit to Inspiria Science Center and Badeland waterpark.

In my spare time I like to hang out in space

 As we sailed towards Oslo on the Color Magic a few days earlier, I told Sverre that of the ferries sailing from Oslo, Stena Saga is definitely next on my list. And once again, I had no idea that we were already booked for the sailing on the 29th of April.

Experience: No(r)way!? Part 2 - How I lost my jawbone

This is the 2nd part of a trip report. First part can be found here.

I left the last part off at walking through Oslo with Sverre after the Color Fantasy cruise, having no clue where he was taking me. All sorts of scenarios were going through my head and I had settled on the guess that we were going to a hotel, though we could've just as well be simply taking a train back to Fredrikstad, or onward to somewhere else. For entertainment, I shared my wildest thought of "We could also be heading to the airport to fly somewhere?" with Sverre, who remained quiet...

Experience: No(r)way!? Part 1 - Color Fantasy

Now I've finally come to the point where I can write down one of my absolute highlights of this year so far - my first trip to Norway to visit Sverre, from the 21st of April until the 2nd of May. It was a rather unusual one for me as prior to the trip I didn't know anything except my arrival and departure dates and times, and what to pack. Sverre was the one doing the plans for my stay and he was very keen on keeping it all a secret, so I had no idea what to expect and didn't really fully believe anything was happening at all until I sat on the plane.

How to kill time before a trip, the my way.

I'm quite certain I already have shared this "Five stages of travel" graph once, at some point, somewhere; afterall, if I had to choose any picture to describe my life, this would most certainly be it, because while there is a lot more to my life, this is what occupies the largest space in my brain. Though one rather important part missing from the picture would be waiting. Of course, having daily duties to attend to, such as school, helps a lot with making time fly faster. But nonetheless, more than once I've found myself anxiously waiting for a trip with a few too many completely free and unplanned days to get over with first. And how would a travel addict solve such a situation? Of course, by booking a quick mini-trip.

Experience: A wave of Baltic Sea ferry madness

In Mid-March, I took another Baltic trip with Sverre, with the two main purposes being to catch the first voyages of the returned Silja Europa, and to celebrate his birthday. We met up in Tallinn; I took a bus from Turku and then Tallink's Superstar to Tallinn. During the two hour crossing I didn't have time for much more than to watch the departure, have a breakfast, and finally, upon arrival to Tallinn, have a nice close first look at the Silja Europa for the first time since 2014, when she left for Australia to serve as floating accommodation for a bit more than a year. In the terminal I was greeted by Sverre and we checked in the nearby hotel Euroopa. The same evening we had a nice dinner in Olde Hansa, my old workplace.

Challenges

You're now reading the result of about a month of failed attempts to bring this blog out of a 6 month hiatus. There has been several reasons why I haven't felt like writing; first of all, I've found it hard for a long time now to keep this blog all about ships as it was initially intended to be. You may have noticed that when I published a row of posts about my World Gymnaestrada 2015 experience. So to solve that, I will call it a personal blog from now on. Afterall, ships are still such a big part of my life that they're surely not going anywhere; I'm just removing some limitations that I've set for myself and hoping that this blog will look and feel a bit more like me.
Secondly, as unlikely as it may sound, so much happened during those 6 months of silence that it simply became too much to write about; and on the other hand, at the same time, while exciting stuff was not happening, I've had a few obstacles to overcome and never found the time or energy to write anything at all.

However, as the happenings in the meanwhile have been far too exciting to just let slip and not share, I will start by getting this blog up to date.

The last thing I wrote down was a trip with my friend Sverre that I had in January. I have travelled with him numerous times since, both in the Baltics and in Norway. In spring, I had some of the most exciting courses at school, in summer I did 58 days of on-board training on Finnsun, a ro-ro cargo ship, and now I've started my 2nd year of school. And those are the topics I will soon post more about.

During my on-board training on the Finnsun I grew to enjoy sights of endless industrial landscapes; sailing into Antwerp through the Netherlands was great in that way, and so was entering St. Petersburg, as seen in this photo.