Overcast with fog banks !

Bringing you up to date with our life on board. We settled into a relaxed routine quite quickly with plenty of reading and a little deck walking from time to time. The weather is not fantastic and the sun cream remains unused, but brave souls that we are we do manage to get out on the balcony - sometimes with a duvet wrapped around us ! Ports of call so far have been interesting and very different from any other parts of the world that we have visited, although the clapperboard houses do remind us of Cape Cod.
Dave and I paid for a pass for the 14 days on board which allows unlimited entry to a spa with a hydropool, steam room etc. Not everyone's cup of tea, but we enjoy the peace and dipping in and out of the pools. Dave loves lying on the heated thermal beds overlooking the sea.
Meeting up in the evening for dinner we exchange stories of what we all got up to - it often includes a little snooze in the day !
What is extraordinary is the light. The sun rose on the morning of the the 27th and won't set again until 11.22 tonight - the 30th July. We have walked out on deck at midnight in the light - very strange.
The shows are reasonable to good. We recognised one of the dancers as a girl who lives 2 doors away from us.
Dave and I were brave enough to go swimming in the outside pool as we were anchored at Ny Alesund - only so we could say that we had swum in the Artic circle ! We had an amazing sailaway there where there were 'bergybits' ( small icebergs) floating by - then sailing past us was the most enormous iceberg. The ship's photographers were lowered into a small rescue boat to take photos of the ship and the iceberg. Photographic licence means that the iceberg in some pictures looks bigger than the ship !
Clothes are beginning to shrink - the vegetarian choice at dinner is really good and I am enjoying trying different dishes each evening.
Today we are in Tromso, so we are off to have a wander around the city now
Julie and Dave