A little factual clean-up...

For all of you geographical sticklers out there (and I know who you are), clearly we are not cruising just the Baltic Sea.  We started in Stockholm, Sweden (on the Baltic), then to Tallinn, Estonia and St. Petersburg, Russia (both on the Gulf of Finland which are arms of the Baltic), then to Helsinki, Finland (which is the north side of the Gulf of Finland from Tallinn),  then to Copenhagen, Denmark also on the Baltic where we disembarked the first week's travelers and took on the present group which are accompanying us on the trip up the coast of Norway (the Norwegian Sea which flows into the Atlantic) to the Arctic Circle (but not to the North Pole), and back again to Copenhagen stopping at different ports along the way.

Sorry.  How boring is that and I know you don't care.  But it makes me a little crazy knowing there are just a few of you out there who are raising eyebrows and saying something like "she doesn't know what she's talking about, etc. etc."  The truth is I am so overwhelmed with information that we are being bombarded with from every direction that I can only communicate zero percent of it and can just give impressions as we experience them.  So please forgive.

Here is another lovely factoid which doesn't fit into the normal sightseeing information.  Literally within fifteen minutes we will be crossing the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees latitude (not sure what that means but Tom is so impressed).  For the next four days the sun will not set and we are in the Land of the Midnight Sun, 24 hours of daylight.  Frankly, we haven't seen nighttime since we arrived because it has stayed light until 10 or 11 at night and then we are asleep.  When I wake in the middle of the night it is already daytime again (I get up and check).  Last night we stayed up until just after midnight and it still wasn't dark and starting tonight there will be no need to check because it will be daylight for 24 hours--for four days.  For the locals it is much much longer.  I'm fascinated by this but would hate to live with it for reasons hinted at earlier.  Of course in the winter it is the opposite--no sunlight for god-knows-how-long.  Awful, but as they say, we can get used to anything.

The other miracle is that we are in the middle of nowhere and there is INTERNET RECEPTION! Imagine.