Celebrities Come to Halmstad

It would take about an hour for the pilot to get us into a port and moored. And in the smaller towns, we were an oddity, this great big ship with sails, pulling in. As we would approach the port, from the deck we could see people from the village hurrying down to the coastline, waving to us. We felt special and important. This particular photo was in Lysekils, but the same thing happened in several places.

On Wednesday morning, we pulled into Halmstad, Sweden, and there were cars driving down to our pier, and families getting out and running to look at us and to wave.

As we watched, our new friend Martha exclaimed, "I think I see a band!" Humoring her, I said, "Oh, yes, that's a french horn!" and it turned out that it was. Halmstad had send the high school band down to welcome us, and they entertained us with old Elvis Presley tunes before going into "Star Wars."

We were enchanted. Talk about feeling special and important!

In each port, the local customs official had to come aboard and meet with the purser who had all of our passports. Usually someone from the local chamber of commerce would come aboard as well, bringing maps and answering questions.

This picture shows the purser, followed by the customs man. On the left, you can see a big white heap -- that is the ship's mainsail, and not visible is the sailmaker's sewing machine: he was doing repairs. In Halmstad, we were advised that a good thing to do would be to take the local art tour (at no cost) and see sculptures by famous artists. The next pictures are from the art tour. I think this was my first Picasso.

Halmstad was a lovely town. Here are some general scenes of Halmstad happenings:

The bottle sculpture/mobile pictured above was in the local library, and I thought it was a gorgeous building. You can see more of it below.

St. Nikolai Church was built in the 13th century and was beautiful inside and out:

I liked Halmstad. The art tour was unique and the village square was comfortable. And, of course, we'd been treated as celebrities. Townspeople came back to the pier at the end of the day to wave us off.