At sea, off southern Sweden: The Baltic Sea supports a lot of ship traffic, we have seldom been out of sight of other ships during this two weeks in the region. In that respect it resembles the eastern coast of Spain or waters around Singapore, both of which are similarly busy.
The seas have been amazingly calm, we’ve rarely felt ship motion, although we happen to at the moment. It’s said the water here is less saline than in the big oceans, which makes a certain sense. The surrounding lands get substantial rains providing fresh water runoff, and the temperatures are cool enough and the humidity high enough that there’s not too much evaporation.
Tomorrow we transit the Kiel Canal, which crosses a peninsula on the northern end of which is Denmark. The canal crosses south of the German border, and we’re told only smallish ships like ours can utilize it. That should be interesting, I’ve no idea whether locks are involved like Panama or if it is a sea level canal like Suez. It is clear no one wanted to spend the money to enlarge it to handle large modern vessels.
This has been a pleasant journey so far; day after tomorrow we disembark and catch a plane back to North America. That will be one of those “longest day” experiences as our jet chases the sun westward around the globe and very nearly keeps up. We land a couple of hours local after we took off many thousand miles earlier, meanwhile gaining back all those hours we lost on the flight to Europe.
I follow the U.S. news cycle as grist for this blog, being over here means being some nine hours ahead of local time in Wyoming, or seven hours ahead of the U.S. east coast. All day long here nothing much is happening in North America which is asleep. The active time for U.S. news here in eastern Europe is the evening, from supper on to bedtime. It seems wrong, somehow, but isn’t.
