Right off the bat I’m going to be honest and tell you this was our least favourite port. We had been completely spoiled by the breathtaking views of our other ports of call and this one felt very much like a city. We all agreed that had we done the ports in reverse starting with stavanger we probably would have enjoyed it more but we had without a doubt been spoiled.
This is not to say we hated this port far from it, it was just our least favourite.
We took a little while to pull ourselves together this morning and disembark. When we stepped off the ship we were greeted by a busy, bustley town, not the mountain top views we had become accustomed too.
We had a wander through the town, we discovered many shops and our first starbucks of the holiday (this is how central this was, it had name branded shops). We were feeling a little disheartened by this port so far, there was nothing wrong with it per say, we were just missing the picturesque side of Norway, we weren’t really interested in the main areas.
We continued our walk through town and found a small park green area and a little further through town we found the Norwegian petroleum museum, although we didn’t venture inside (again it was very expensive and the children were struggling with sensory processing and regulation at this point in the holiday), it had an awesome deep underwater welding submarine (a dry dock). We had a great time exploring this and it was a struggle to eventually drag the children away.
Walking back to the ship we walked along a pretty waterside dock. Spent the last of our Norwegian Krone and were amazed and uplifted by the pride we found here.
Our initial thoughts on this port were reasonably negative as we stumbled straight into the town centre which felt very city-like. However after more of an exploration down some of the backstreets, we found parts that were calmer and prettier.
As previously stated it was far from our favourite port but was lovely in its own right.