Kiel Monday 25 August

I went ashore about 9.00 and sat in the very modern cruise terminal updating the blog and checking my mail. The wifi was good for a while, then just died, so I headed down to the streets. This is the sister ship to the Costa Concordia which sank:

Not more than a block from the pier is the beginning of the pedestrian shopping area; there are lots of people about because there are three cruise ships in port. Yes, it's cold but I'm prepared today. I had a pleasant time wandering around, bought a couple of little items and now I'm in Maccas, completing my emails. (There's a Starbucks here too.) I bought some German cinnamon; I figure that even though it's not the pinnacle of cinnamon - Dutch (I couldn't find a supermarket) - it's probably better than what we can get at home. I'm hoping that the sealed package will be okay through customs. If not, I've thrown away 1 euro!

Quite a few people are off the ship most of the day on excursions to Hamburg and other places, so it's relatively quiet. Time to go back aboard and have lunch - yes, eating again!!

I had a quiet lunch, with so many people ashore, caught up on some photo editing and went to the tech session on OneDrive.

At dinner they had the farewell parade of crew members, but no Baked Alaska ... many of the nice little touches (albeit expensive) of cruising are disappearing forever. I know they’re non-essentials but they do make the experience that much more special. I guess people just can’t be bothered with all the dressing up – a shame. They’re obviously also trying to cut costs.

I said goodbye to Betty from my dining group because she’s on an all-day excursion tomorrow.

The Captain told us we would be going under one of the three longest suspension bridges on the course to Copenhagen – at about 11.00pm tonight! So I spent quite some time up in the Crows Nest, then out on Observation Deck the last 15 minutes: hiding around the corner out of the biting wind. It was virtually impossible to get a good shot heading towards the bridge in the dark, but I took shots as we scraped underneath: there wasn’t much clearance for the funnels!

These pictures aren't that good because I was shaking so much in the wind, and it's necessarily a time exposure. You can get an idea of how close the bridge was above us though, quite eerie going over. Approaching the bridge:

Going under: