Pulling out of Portsmouth, England at 5am and an Underway Replenishment (UNREP) at 2am the following night do not mix well with pulling into port and having duty on the day you pull in.  I was completely exhausted upon arriving in Gothenburg, Sweden.  I think that the exhaustion was felt by everyone on the ship, since a large part of the crew participates in the UNREP.  Gothenburg was a pretty good port.  The worst part about it was that we were anchored so far away, but I enjoyed the time that we had there.

So we anchored (again) in a bay outside Gothenburg, Sweden early on Friday morning last week.  The first time that we anchored was, apparently, to close to a major traffic lane in the bay, so we had to move further away, which made for a pretty long ride between the pier and the ship.  I was supposed to have a watch on the pier in the morning, but we were so far from shore that it took about 3 hours round trip to get to shore and back.  I was tired enough that I just went to sleep after most of the important stuff was done in the morning.  We had been told that we were going to receive over 40 pallets of supplies, so everyone was expecting to have a big working party sometime in the afternoon.  The pallets didn’t end up arriving until around dinnertime, so I was glad that I spent most of the afternoon catching up on my sleep.  There were hundreds of cases of sodas, big 50 pound boxes of frozen meat, small boxes of snack bars, more soda, fresh fruit, big boxes of chips, and even more soda.  The working part was probably one of the biggest that I’d seen.  The entire ship took part in it, and even the chiefs and officers joined in.  The XO hooked up the 1MC, the main announcing speakers throughout the ship, to an iPod, and wherever you went on the ship, you could hear the music playing.  The working party just barely finished before sunset, and everyone was glad that it was done.  I had colors in the evening, which meant that I had to get into my dress blues and haul down the flag when it was time.  Even though I had slept until almost dinnertime earlier, I quickly fell asleep after taps.

The next day was Saturday, and I had already arranged with another guy on the ship who’s name is also Spencer, that we would be liberty buddies in Sweden.  We planned to leave on the 0930 liberty launch, and we were pretty close to the front of a long line of people that were eager for some liberty.  The launch was pretty big, and we fit everyone that wanted to on liberty onto the boat.  The ride to the pier was just a little over an hour, so we actually got onto the pier by 1015.  We spotted a mall within sight of where we were, and decided to see what kind of stuff a Swedish mall sells.  There were a few souvenir shops near the entrance, a lot of clothing stores throughout the mall, and a few restaurants.  We ate at a restaurant that hadn’t been inundated by the lunch rush yet, and the food was actually really good.  We didn’t really want to eat very much, so I just had some soup.  The best store that we went into in the whole mall was a store that sold chocolate, coffee, and tea.  They had an entire wall of tins of tea, some very shiny coffee bean dispensers, and a whole counter of chocolate.  I posted the counter of chocolate on my Flickr photos page.  Yes, I did buy some chocolate to bring back home to share with a few people.

We wandered around the city for a while in the afternoon.  The streets are really wide throughout the city.  There is a path for bicycles, another path for pedestrians, the normal two lanes for car traffic in each direction, and a set of tracks for the public transportation that goes almost everywhere in the city.  You can see how wide the streets were in a couple of pictures that I posted on Flickr.  We passed by two large soccer, or it’s correct European name of football, stadiums near the center of the city.  There was a theater playing Spiderman 3, but we didn’t have the extra two hours and 20 minutes it would have taken to watch it.  We made our way to the downtown part of the city, where there was a large crowd of people all gathered for a 13 mile marathon that was happening that day.  A couple of the guys from our ship participated in the marathon, but they weren’t quite as prepared as they thought they were.  They were extremely worn out by the end of the day, and they could barely move from how sore they were.

We ate at a Hard Rock café that afternoon, and the food there was very American.  I got a New York Strip steak, which was cooked almost perfectly, except for the extra fat that isn’t usually on a steak like that.  The Hard Rock café also had a virtual bowling alley on the top floor of the 3 story restaurant, so we played a couple of games.  I’d never gone virtual bowling before, and it was a little strange.  The lane was only about 15 feet long, and then there was a projector screen hanging at the end of the lane.  When you bowled, the ball would roll down to the end of the lane, and then stop and a virtual bowling ball would continue down the lane on the projector screen.  I didn’t do very well at it, but I firmly believe that the physics of the virtual bowling computer were flawed.  If I’d been in a real bowling alley, I don’t think I would have lost.

The money here was called Kronars, which we I believe translates to Crowns.  We were a little confused about the actual exchange rate, but determined that it was about 7 crowns to 1 dollar, which was a pretty good exchange rate, except that everything seemed like it was more expensive than if it were in dollars.  I’ve gotten a pretty impressive collection of coins from all the different ports we’ve been to this deployment.  I’m sure that I’ll have quite a lot of interesting currencies by the time this deployment is over.

We had been told that there would be a liberty launch departing at 1900, and it was about 1830 by the time we were done bowling.  We made our way back toward the pier as quickly as we could, but as we were crossing a bridge to get back to the pier, we could see our liberty boat leaving.  I must admit that it was very prompt and left exactly at 1900, and if we’d been just 5 minutes early then we would have made it.  Since we missed that one, we determined to wait for the next one, which was supposed to be there in just a couple of hours.  Two hours came and went, and our liberty boat hadn’t shown up yet.  We occupied our time talking with some guards from the Royal Navy that were on watch on the pier, but after 3 hours still no liberty boat.  We discovered from someone more informed that us that the last boat would be at 2300, which it would have been nice to know ahead of time.  Near the pier that we were on while we were waiting for our liberty boat, there was a Spanish supply ship, which happened to be the same ship that we refueled with only a couple days earlier.  The other Spencer that I was with had spent a couple of days aboard the ship because of a special request that he had put in.  He was pretty friendly with some of the guys that were the equivalent rank of a 2^nd class Petty Officer, so we went over there to see if they would let us hang out while we waited.  Once the quarterdeck on the Spanish supply ship finally figured out what we wanted, they let us go below decks to the 2^nd class mess.  We hung out there with about 10 guys that were there, and they were very friendly.  They were watching the equivalent of American Idol on the TV and playing some game with dice on the counter.  All the other navies of the world allow their sailors to drink on board, so they were also offering us beer and wine while we were there.  If we’d gone over there earlier, we would have had more time to relax with them, but we didn’t want to miss the liberty boat again, so we left by about 2240.  It was another hour ride back to the ship, and we had to drag a few drunk people on board, but it was a pretty good day of liberty in Sweden.

Sunday was pretty relaxed, and we got underway from Sweden in the afternoon.  The weather in the Northern European oceans has been pretty calm.  Someone said that it rains 340 days out of the year in Sweden, and it did rain on us a little while we were there.  It is a lot chillier here than it was in the warm Caribbean seas, but I’m looking forward to some of our other planned ports that we will be visiting soon.