Our itinerary today was simple: eat breakfast, get on a boat, and see some fjords.

Hotel Bergen Børs offers a pretty good breakfast spread. Haleigh’s tired of hearing this anecdote (she told me this morning), but the best hotel breakfast I’ve ever had was at the Westin Tokyo in Ebisu. This was a very close second. Tomorrow I might upgrade it to best, because we found an espresso machine after drinking 2 coffees each.

That business done, we crossed the street to Bryggen i Bergen—the pier 🤓. Anyone that knows Haleigh passably well knows she’s an amazing detail-oriented planner. Anyone that knows Haleigh exceptionally well knows she’s terrible with directions. We walked right past the ship that read “Rødne Fjord Cruises” because our tickets said something different, walked about a third of a mile down the wharf, and finally realized we had about 10 minutes to double-time it back to the right boat.

Needless to say, we made it. The wind was bitingly cold, but thanks to Haleigh’s foresight to wear thermal base layers, we stayed relatively warm. It was a 3.5 hour cruise, and I stayed topside for ~60% of it (I had a good spot, I couldn’t give that up!).

A lady came up to me towards the beginning and asked if I was a professional photographer. Rather than overexplain, I just looked at all the gear hanging off my body, shrugged, and said “yes.” I thought this would be the end of the conversation, but then she asked me if I would send her all my photos from the day. Despite how I felt about that, I said “sure, give me your WhatsApp.” As she went to go find a pen and paper, she returned with a friend. She introduced me, and then asked if I would also take pictures of the two of them throughout the cruise too. Because I can never be the tough guy I want to be and say “get ****ed lady,” I simply said “I’d love to, but this is day 2 of my holiday and I only brought one memory card, so I need to conserve space…” Which is true, but I left out the part where I also brought a laptop and would be backing up my photos to the cloud every night.

Apart from that exchange, the day was an absolute delight. It was mostly overcast, but I was impressed with how much detail my camera was able to pull out of the sky. For the most part, I bracketed each shot across 3 exposures with 3/4 of a stop between each one—meaning the final output of each photo was a composite of 3 photos: over-exposed, under-exposed, and just right. The over-exposed portions of the frame became the landscape, the under-exposed bits the sky. Not that most people I know reading this care for that level of detail, but the coups de gracie was the panoramic of the small town at the end of the cruise.

I can’t recall the name of the town, but the captain said there were ~300 people that lived there, only about 100 of which lived where we could see. If I ever need to drop off the grid, this might just be where I go. I did the same bracketing trick, but 5 times across. The below pano is made from 15 images that I first converted to 5 High Dynamic Range (HDR) images, and then stitched into a panoramic. It wasn’t perfectly level (hey, we were on a moving boat), but damn do I love when a plan comes together.

One of Haleigh’s coworkers happens to be Norwegian and gave us an inside scoop on a few things to do/try. One of those things was reindeer sausage at a small stand called 3-Kroneren. TBH, you wouldn’t have known it was reindeer—you would be much too intrigued by the combination of spicy mustard, lingonberry sauce, and fried onions. We might need to go back tomorrow 🤤

I took a lot of photos today (685, to be exact). Here were some of my favorites, click to see full size: