As you can see by the photo, our bucket list is starting to look a little worse for wear. So far we’ve crossed off about 20 countries, 18 waterfalls, 342 cathedrals, and 3 shoe stores from the list, so all that’s left is some odds and ends, such as neutralizing Putin and refraining from dying.

As a result of our Norwegian cruise, I now have to scrub “See the Northern Lights” off the bucket. The next one up is: “Run into a crowded bar screaming ‘WHAT YEAR IS IT?'” But I think I want to wait to do that in an American bar because I don’t think most Portuguese would be able to understand my tortured Portuguese. Especially in Screaming Mode. Besides, I don’t think I can put enough panic into “Em que ano estamos?” They’d probably just think I was really a clueless American and offer me some vodka to calm me down. Okay, it’d definitely be worth it for the vodka, so Portugal may hear from me yet, at least until I kick that bucket.

Anyway, if you’re anything like me, and God help you if you are, you’ve probably heard the terms “See the Northern Lights” or “Shoot an apple off someone’s head” or “Do something dangerously stupid in front of a camera” hundreds of times and never really gave them a lot of thought except that of course they should be on everyone’s bucket list.

But just in case one of your bucket list items is also: “know someone who saw the Northern Lights,” you’re in luck! Here follows our firsthand account of seeing the Northern Lights for the very first time:

The four of us were sitting at our table eating dinner when a voice suddenly blared over the loudspeaker: “The Northern Lights are visible! The Northern Lights are visible! Stampede immediately!”

While those may not have been the exact words, that seems to be what everyone on the ship heard. You’d think that they’d just announced the hot fudge sundae dispenser at the buffet had just been fixed the way everyone jumped out of their seats and started running. Except it was the kind of running you do to make it look like you’re walking because you’re embarrassed to be seen actually running, but everyone in the entire world can tell that you are in fact sprinting.

Of course, here I’m poking fun at my fellow passengers while the truth is we were speed-walking our way to the exits with the best of them. I was surprised at it all because I had thought we were the only people on the ship who really, really wanted to see the Northern Lights. Boy was I wrong! During the mad dash to the door someone got their finger stuck in my ear and someone else took a bite out of one of my socks, but we eventually got outside with minimal blood loss.

Once we hit the freezing wind, all hell really broke loose. The announcer forgot to add, “And baby it’s coooold outside!” to the announcement, so when dozens of excited tourists careened onto a deck coated with ice, there was slipping and sliding, skating and flopping, and cursing and screaming galore. People were falling on top of each other and generally looking like a school of freshly caught tuna being poured onto a deck, all just to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights. (Truthfully, one lady apparently hurt her arm during the scramble. It was a little bit amusing to watch the mayhem from off to the side, as long as no one got seriously hurt. Which means, I suppose, that being funnily hurt is okay.)

Once the wounded were carted off and the hoopla died down, we gingerly tip-toed our way outside in order to see Miss Aurora. I had snapped only the single photo above of the developing riot before I began worrying that my forehead might end up getting tattooed with the outline of a shoe tread, so I missed out on more exciting images, sorry about that. But to give you an honest feel for what it was like: the ship was pitching badly back and forth in fairly rough seas, the icy wind was hitting our faces like a frozen sledgehammer, thick ice covered the deck, and there was a crowd of people all trying to get through a door and out into the ice all at once while wearing street shoes and trying to keep their balance while holding their phones aloft. So yeah, it was a miracle there weren’t some fatalities.

So did you see that previous small photo with all those colors filling the entire sky? Well we sure didn’t, that’s not my photo. Not that it was totally uninteresting, but this gray smudge is more or less what we saw at first.

I mean, it’s not really much of an eyeful, is it? We thought maybe our vision was just pulling a yolk on us or something, as you can see by the zoom-in gathered from one of our selfies. Egg-xactly.

What we learned very quickly is that what you see with the naked, or nude, eye is a bit different than what you see with the clothed eye. Not sure about the egged eye. I’m scrambling to whip up a better comment, but I’m too chicken to poach from someone else, so I’ll have to come out of my shell and hatch a new plan.

BTW, Carolyn made me promise never to use that image again. It is kinda mega creepy, which is why I laugh maniacally whenever I use it.

Back to reality: by clothed eye, I mean what digital photography sees and takes a picture of. For example, below are two similar photos, one showing what it’s like to see with the naked, or nude, eye, the other from the lens of an iPhone. In layman’s terms, the digital magranometers in the lenses of the phone adjust their paleintelogic sensors automatically to the refractional deltoids from the atmospheric thrombosii, thereby reducing the spectrumized dilation continuums into a more visible spectrum. At least that’s how it seems to me.

One looks like maybe a faint cloud, the other looks like what a faint cloud might look like on Planet Everything’s Green.

Here’s another good example. So what we actually saw looked basically like clouds at night. As soon as we held up our phones, they turned green on the screen, kind of like those science fiction movies where you only see the aliens in their true form by looking through the bottom an old bottle of Prell shampoo. “You can tell with Prell!” went the anti-alien government ad.

Which doesn’t mean the lights weren’t interesting and worth a backdrop in a photo of me even though I look like I probably did when my 6th grade teacher promised me a big prize for winning a race and all I got was a bag of four mostly unchewed gummy bears and a button that said “Winer!” that they got at a discount because of the misspelling (at least I hope it was a misspelling) and so I’m paying Sister Koppert back by writing a big-ol’ run-on sentence, take that Sister Grammar Nazi! Also, I don’t think my beard was gray in the 6th grade.

So while the lights weren’t unimpressive, they mostly served one main purpose: Cross one more item off our bucket list.

Someone asked me if we could see any other colors besides green in the lights. As you can see here, there is a bit of tinge of red, and you could kinda see that with your naked, or nude, eye. I imagine that every viewing of the Aurora Borealis is different from minute to minute and place to place. We got the Beginner’s Aurora Borealis. It was, after all, our first shot at it, so it’s understandable that they reserved the good stuff for the professionals.

I did drive myself a little batty trying to figure out why I thought someone might be in trouble while I shot this photo, but I couldn’t quite figure out why I felt that way.

Anyway, here are the best of the rest of the photos we shot over a two-night period. The second night went a lot better since the Aurora Borealis was brighter and all the troublemakers were still in hospital beds. But mostly, we were now a shipful of experienced Borealis watchers, so when they announced it again, only one knucklehead leapt up and started to run for the exits, until he noticed he was the only one. He stopped suddenly, looked around, and with some poorly covered-up sheepishness, walked quickly into the men’s room instead. I kinda really did have to go, though.

The rush to the bathroom story makes me want to finish off this entry with a very serious commentary on some problems with getting older, which everyone except the dead is doing simultaneously. It’s just that some of us bellyache about it all a lot more. And yes, this has everything to do with Norway, a country that managed to disappoint me greatly despite it’s wonderful scenery, delightful people, first-rate social structure, and perfect town names.

I just want to say that it’s no easy feat to make it to 65 years of age. In fact, no one in the history of the world who died when they were 64 or younger ever made it to 65, and so obviously I’m a lot better than billions of other people. Which is why I should get discounts.

As you lurch, stumble, stagger and wallow your way into your 60’s, you learn that grunts are a necessary accompaniment to mundane tasks such as shoe tying, turning your head, or beginning to lift one foot up so you can get out of bed. You also learn that Toilet Location Awareness (what us seniors know as TLA) becomes a vital survival strategy for virtually everywhere you go, including a quick run to the grocery store or a walk into your garage. Or when you’re rolled into the inside of an MRI scanner and they tell you the whole scan is going to take 1-1/2 hours, so you panic just a little wondering if you can hold everything for that long. And then you wonder if there are senior discounts on MRIs. And then you forget what you were wondering about other than why MRIs have to be so freakin’ loud.

You also wonder how it is that some of your aches and pains can suddenly develop their own personal aches, and even your grunts get their own grunts because, y’know, grunting takes effort. Body parts start falling off so often you’re constantly checking the ground behind you in case it’s something you still might need. So when you hit 65 you think woohoo! At least now I can get a discount on a meal at a Denny’s restaurant, or a euro/buck off a movie ticket, or even just to sit in a seat beneath a sign showing the outlines of a handicapped person, a pregnant woman, and a man with one foot inside a coffin. Oh such wonderful rewards almost makes all this grunting worth it!

But not if you’re Norwegian. In Norway, apparently you have to wait another 2 years to enjoy all of those benefits. That really sucks! You know how many people die between 65 and 67? I can’t imagine dying before I get my Denny’s discount. Now I’m terrified of dying within the next two years. It’s like waiting your whole life to go to Disneyland and when you finally get there you suddenly keel over, your life force ebbing out of you just long enough for you to understand your life has been a complete failure because you never even got to ride the teacups. The horror! The horror!

So yeah, Norway, you’ve disappointed me. I worked diligently to avoid dying in order to get to 65. Raising the bar to 67 is like lifting the tennis net just as the victor jumps over it. Now I have to wait until my next entry to know whether I’m going to forgive you. (Hint: I do.)

Lastly, I can’t forget to use up some more of our regular views from the ship. I can’t let them just sit and rot in my computer without being seen by my reader! (Hi mom!)

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