St. Johns, Newfoundland

I was so surprised to discover that St. John's was probably my favorite port on our cruise. I just absolutely fell in love with it.


Thanks to the boat lectures, I knew that the best thing to do there was go hiking. The city has over six miles of hiking trails. I thought, no problem. We had NO IDEA that the first few miles of the trails were literally on cliffs with like 1,000 stairs.


We met some famous Canadian actress who was walking towards the bottom of the first trail, and she showed us the way. She was there filming some TV show that is aired in 26 countries, but not the U.S., so I had no clue who she was. A few people stopped her along the way, so guess she's somebody. Anyway, we just went for it. We planned on doing all six miles but with the way the trails connected it was probably more like four. It was so gorgeous! The first mile or so was definitely the most difficult. I would stop on the stairs just to breathe, and we would get lapped by like 70 year olds. That was motivation, let me tell you.



After we walked for a few hours, we went into the town. Which I also loved (but didn't take any photos of). I found an internet cafe which was a HUGE deal because we had no email on the boat while we were in the Arctic, and I had to send my resume to a company in NYC that I was interviewing with when we got back. Kevin found an awesome old placed called the Ship's Pub for lunch and a beer, and I bought a row house mailbox. Most of the streets have these row houses, separated only by color, and a lot of the mailboxes are row houses. I just had to have one! Even though I live in a condo.


If I ever had the opportunity to go back to St. John's or live there for a period of time, I won't think twice. The people were so nice, the town was so cute, and the scenery was beautiful.

A view from half way up the first trail

Do you see all of the stairs up the side of the rocks? We were so excited to be able to see the end of our misery!

Yet another rock thing on the top of a mountainThis is where I want to live when I move to St. John's. Their view is the ocean and cliffs.
A row house mailbox!

Qaqortoq, Greenland

I couldn't wait to get to Qaqortoq. Greenland is just a place not many people have been . I read up on it before we left, and attended a lecture on the ship about it as well. We decided that if we had to miss one of the two unique ports on this cruise, Iceland was better to miss than Greenland. Simply because we can always do Iceland, but it's SO hard to get up here.


I knew before we got off the ship that there was not going to be much to do. Like, pretty much nothing. The ship being there doubled their population. It was going to be about just being there. And you can't get anywhere else, because there are no roads connecting the towns/villages in the country. You have to go by dogsled, snow mobile, plane or boat. We did spend a little bit of time walking around the tiny town when we first got in. There were two small churches, a hotel, smelly fish houses (their main industry) and Inuit people walking around probably totally annoyed that we had taken over their Saturday afternoon (which appears to be laundry day there). Some of them had on their traditional dress, which is similar to what we would think of Eskimos wearing. Inuits are the same as Eskimos, but for some reason they think of the word Eskimo as slang, and they go by Inuit.


Just for the heck of it, we went into their grocery store to see what prices were. We knew they were going to be high because everything there has to be imported due to their lack of soil and being able to grow, and their climate being so cold that they do not have livestock. We almost DIED! A dozen eggs were the equivalent of $6.00 and a litre of Tangueray was $90! Some people who had a beer there told us that their beers were $9.00 each.


We set out to take a long walk and get out of the town. I loved the houses there- they are all different bright colors. Most of them were run down, but a few at the top of the town were awesome. Kevin heard the color of your house depended on what your profession was, but we're not sure. I had it in my head that I wanted to walk over the top of the town to the right of the photo below, so that's what we did. It was pretty tough actually, but totally worth it. I thought we would just go up there, enjoy the view, and come back down. But we decided to keep walking for a few hours because it was just so beautiful. The land is different than any other I have been on (everything grows low- no trees) and the view was unreal. The water was so blue! There were very few other people out hiking and it kind of felt like we were the only ones there. Luckily it was a beautiful sunny day, and about 50 degrees out.


The wind really started to pick up when we were walking back towards the town. I mean to the point where you were fighting to walk against it. I'm just happy it didn't start until later in the day, or we might not have made it to Greenland either!

A view of the town from our ship on the way inAnd you say that how?! We said Quark O Tork because I don't know how to do the no "R' thing. The Captain called it the "Q" place during his announcements.The flag of Greenland that represents the sun setting on the ice
These rock towers were on top of a lot of the cliffs. Kevin would get rocks from the bottom and bring them to the top

Some traditional clothing hung out on wash day

Cruising in Greenland

I have never seen more "Q"'s than in words in Greenland.


I was so, so excited to go to Greenland. I knew there wouldn't be much to do there, but I mean, who goes there? We got a nice little surprise after they cancelled Belfast and Iceland on us- they announced that we were going to do some un-planned cruising in the southern fjords. Kevin and I woke up to an announcement that we were passing a huge iceberg early in the morning, and we could see it right out our window. It was so strange though. I had no idea how big it was. Being on the boat, I didn't have any size perception. Was it the size of a car, or the size of a 10 story building? We passed many icebergs as the day went on, and caught one with a seal on it. My problem with that was that I didn't know how big the seal was. Considering the fact I thought it was a bird at first, I'm assuming the iceberg was pretty large.


It was just a beautiful afternoon sitting outside the town of Narssaq. People were out and about on the boat, and we ran into a few people who had become our "cruise friends" to enjoy some time with. It was so nice to know that the next morning we were going to wake up and be able to spend the day exploring on shore (in a different area).


You can kind of tell how large the one iceberg is in the last photo. That is a boat riding around it to the left.

Reykjavik, Iceland

Welp, here's how close I got to Iceland. One mile away. It was a super windy day, and they just couldn't get the ship in. So, I read a book and looked at it from afar. Maybe next trip?!

Dublin, Ireland

The second stop on our cruise was in Dublin, which we were both pretty excited about. Little did we know when we docked that we were actually going to have two days in Dublin! We could not leave the docks that night because the weather was getting bad. This was our first taste of reality in regards to a trans-Atlantic cruise. Not everything goes as planned because you never know what the weather is going to bring.


The first day, we were total tourists. We started the day off at Trinity College, the oldest University in Ireland. We took a great tour with one of the students. The library at that place is unreal! We saw the Book of Kells, which is an illustrated manuscript gospel book created by Celtic monks in about the year 800. It is so well preserved, and so impressive. They figured out ways to use to many colors. Considering the fact they did not have Crayola markers back then and had to use nature to create them, I was impressed.


Next we walked through the city to the Guinness factory, a must-do. The tour part of it didn't impress me too much, but it was worth going through the whole thing to have the beer at the end and see the impressive views of the city from their bar. I'm not a huge fan of Guinness, but I gave it a go. Kevin was happy to drink my leftovers!


The rest of the first day was all about stocking up on wine and cigars to smuggle on the boat.


When we found out that we were not leaving (and missing our stop in Belfast, Northern Ireland- sad face) we of course went back into the city to check out the pubs. There is an area called Temple Bar (it's also a bar) and we went to a few places there. I had read about a place called Brazen Head that was the oldest bar in Dublin, so we hiked it up there for lunch. Overall, it was just an awesome day. Unfortunately, it started to rain pretty hard when we were walking back and no raincoats or umbrellas could stop us from getting totally soaked. Better the end of the day than the beginning!

The main square at Trinity College

The oldest bar in Dublin!

A little wet!

Falmouth, UK

Kevin and I flew to London on a Wednesday night, got in on a Thursday, and took a bus to Southampton for the night. We wanted to get everywhere we needed to be a day early to make sure we didn't miss the boat, because we opted for the zero insurance plan. Maybe not the smartest idea, but it worked for us.


Southampton was really cute (sorry, no pics). We stayed in a hotel on my Continental miles that was nice, but had no "lift". We had about four bags at 50 lbs each to get up to the third floor. Good thing Kevin's so buff. That night we found VERY local pub, woke up the next day and walked the town for a few hours, and then got on the Crown Princess for our two week vacation!


Our first port was Falmouth, UK in the Cornwall area. I didn't do as much research on this town as I did some of the others, so I wasn't sure what to expect. It was really small, but nice. We pretty much just walked all day up and down hills checking things out until our legs felt like they were going to fall off (a common theme on our vacation) and then went and sat at a pub by the water and people watched. There was a castle up on one of the hills that we hiked up to. It was closed to the public for a wedding. Nice.

This is how people have to get on and off their boats depending on where the tide is.
Dad, new idea for the boathouse?!

Kevin and I outside of the closed castle. But we were able to walk around through all of the moats.

And this would be the line we had to stand in for an hour to get back on the boat. We met the guy who used to own Waste Management and he and his wife kept us entertained.

Falmouth was a good town to start our cruise in. It gave us a day to just kind of relax and not feel like we had to see it all after the traveling and getting settled on the boat.

Off to Dublin!

The Fuller Birthdays

I haven't gotten to all of my vacation pictures yet, so I thought I would post this real quick. Once again, my mom is the best! Birthday parties for all three of us in August and September. My birthday is actually not until next Monday, but I wanted to have my get-together while Kevin was here (he had to leave today for his new job with the Grease tour).


I think that Brendan loves our birthdays as much as we do! He's the best at helping us open our gifts and blow out our candles. :)