Trondheim

It's about noon-thirty and we're in the old part of Trondheim. Kristiana, Kristi and Madelyn are touring the old archbishop's palace, and I'm sitting outside the cathedral resting my legs which are suffering from my not limbering up before hitting the treadmill this morning.

Yesterday's tour of Alesund was a semi-bust, the town too rainy and our guide too quiet to make for an enjoyable, or even educational, walking tour. The sky cleared an hour or two later, and we did get in a little exploring in our damp clothes before returning to the ship and a hot shower.

The hot shower turned into a nap since we'd been up so early. We woke up a half hour into dinner service and rushed upstairs to join Kristi and Madelyn who'd already received their main courses. It was traditional-hat night in the dining room, it seems, and all the women had received little Dutch wimple-like headcovering, and the men had black seamen's caps with brims. If Kristiana hasn't blogged her photo of Madelyn in her wimple-thing admiring her dessert (chocolate mousse in a cup of chocolate), I'll make sure she does.

From dinner we went straight to the line for the night's Prairie Home Companion performance, and were rewarded with superb seats, a couch in the front seating the four of us plus a couple that K+M knew.

The show was pure pleasure as expected, and we kept our seats for the storytelling seminar that followed. That turned out to be a few introductory remarks from Garrison followed by nenbers of the audience being invited to get up and share their own stories, under Garrison's gentle prompting and guidance. It was lots of fun.

When we got out near midnight the sun had gone down but it was still fairly light outside. It's like that here. Not quite the midnight sun, but very much the midnight twilight.