After spending a few wonderful days in London, and trying unsuccessfully to acclimate to the time change we we shuttled by bus nearly two hours to Dover, England. There on a pier pretty much by itself was the Norwegian Dream.

The Dream was built in 1992 but underwent a major overhaul in 1998 when it was stretched by 130 feet. The room we had here was definitely bigger than what we had on our last cruise and there were more common areas. It did not have any two story atrium areas however. One nice thing about the ship is that it was amazingly smooth and quiet. We barely felt a wave in our 12 day cruise but then again the weather was great so the seas were also incredibly calm. So much for the famously stormy North Sea. I guess that's only in winter.

The food was pretty good, but like all cruises, be prepared to gain weight. We worked very hard to watch what we ate and kept as active as possible so we did remarkably well in the weight department. There is also a fitness trainer on the ship who runs several fitness workshops throughout the day. His sessions were incredibly challenging. He himself was training for an Ironman competition in Australia later in the year. Heck, we even saw him in Oslo training in his free time.

The Internet cafe was small but many people, myself included, brought laptops and they had 802.11b WiFi hotspots in a couple public areas of the ship. All you had to do was power up your laptop and surf. I was very disappointed to find their method of authentication was very Microsoft proprietary so be aware you're going to run into major problems if you have a laptop running Linux or MacOS. I tried several times to get it to work with Linux to no avail. It was very frustrating as I had all my files and E-mail setups in Linux already. The access is also not cheap, the basic rate was $.75/minute but you could pre-purchase minutes in bulk so the cheapest rate was $.40/minute. It was decently fast for a satellite connection. I got about 900K for some downloads, much slower on the upload.