On a Sunday we were back in Denmark as our ship docked in Arhus, an attractive university town. Among the 300,000 residents are 40,000 students. There was a high school band on the pier to greet us as we docked at Arhus Havn. You could tell you were back in Denmark by the number of bicycles in evidence. On other stops bicycles did not seem as numerous, as widely used, as important part of the culture, as they are in Denmark.

We visited the old town, Den Gamle Be where a collection of old half-timbered buildings from all over Denmark had been moved and reconstructed there. It's part of the European tradition of open-air museums. It's a recreated village as it would have been in the old days with tradesmen's shops, wine cellars, taverns, bakeries, and with people in costume doing old tasks. Children are invited to get involved. Horse and wagon teams carry visitors around the cobblestone streets. Sturbridge Village and Plymouth Plantation come to mind as does, Williamsburg, Virginia, as you tour the streets.

Later in Arhus we drove by beautiful upscale homes along a beach road and saw the queen's summer residence. The royal role, as in all of Scandinavia, is now strictly ceremonial.

The town has a Tivoli, long winding roads of lush forests, and an overall look of tidiness and prosperity. A man went by on a bike carrying a bass fiddle case as he rode past a British pub with the moniker Dr. Watson.

We stopped at the new Music House, a modern building and an art museum shaped like the Guggenheim. Through a window we saw a huge representation of a boy in shorts, a muscular giant really, kneeling, with huge feet and fingernails and toenails that were very eerily real.

The guide wistfully informed us that we were the last cruise ship of the season to stop in the town.

Our last stop on our Baltic adventure was Oslo, Norway, a very expensive city, where the country's coffers are richer from their North Sea oil reserves. The financial crisis did not hit Norway with the intensity it struck other countries. I had been in Norway years before, and now as then I found it an interesting city for touristing. On our own in the morning we wandered from the pier to the main pedestrian shopping street which was virtually indistinguishable from others we had visited, but I did see Dolly Dimple's Pizza shop.

Berthed next to our ship was a familiar sight, the Christian Radich, one of the tall ships I had seen in the 1976 parade of sailing ships, that was part of the Centennial Operation Sail celebration in New York City. The ship, a three-masted, steel hulled, sailing ship built in 1937 was originally a training vessel for the merchant marine. In 1958 a film in Cinemiracle was shown in specially equipped theaters about a voyage on the ship. Since 1999 it has been privately owned, and is used for charter.

On our guided tour later in the day we visited the museum of Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) where his exploration vessels, the Kon Tiki and the Ra II, are located. It's an interesting museum with a short segment of Heyerdahl's 1947 film to watch. Next we visited the museum of the Viking ships where century-old ships, unearthed by archeologists, still in excellent shape, are displayed.

The guide talked about various kings. One would ask his subjects, "Do you want to be a Christian?" If the person answered in the negative, his or her head was chopped off. Why did that king became a saint? Because he made so many converts. The guide talked about King William IV who was so short they called him King Christian Quarter. He was such a drunk that after 5 p.m. no one bothered to listen to him.

In the afternoon we visited the Vigeland Sculpture Gardens with its 650 nude granite statues. The city gave Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943) a house and studio, and he gave them his art. Stonecutters did the actual carving from his models. At the top of a mound is his famous granite monolith obelisk with 121 writhing, intertwined bodies. Some have labeled it orgiastic, others see it as a metaphor for capitalism where people climb on each other to get to top.

Most of the Milles statues we saw in Stockholm are light, lyrical, graceful, and seem to float, take flight and soar whereas the Vigeland stone statues are solid, heavy, down-to-earth, monumental, grounded.

Another famous Norwegian artist was Edvard Munch (1863-1944). His name is pronounced monk. His painting "The Scream" is world-famous. Vigeland and Munch shared a girlfriend, each taking different days of the week to be with her. One day Munch took one of Vigeland's days, and they remained enemies for years.

We passed the Nazi Gestapo headquarters in WWII. Many Norwegians still bear ill will toward the Swedes because while they remained neutral in WWII, they allowed the Germans to cross through Sweden in their invasion of Norway in WWII.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Norway each year, and the laureate usually gives a speech in Olso. He or she often appears on the balcony of the Grand Hotel. Norway was the home of the playwright Henrik Ibsen who transformed modern drama.

Leaving Oslo you get some beautiful views as you head out the channel though they are not as striking as those you get exiting Stockholm. As we sat with our cocktails in the Crow's Nest at sunset, the sky was a gorgeous blue color suffused with gold.

Everywhere we went, on every tour the local guides talked about the negative effects of the worldwide economic slowdown with higher unemployment, the tightness of money and a downturn in business activity, but in Norway the crisis had been mitigated by an oil-rich bonanza.

John (Jack) Rooney's latest novel is "Last Passage to Santiago," a suspenseful travel-thriller that has romance, infidelity, and a kidnapping. His first book was the thriller "Nine Lives Too Many" featuring his series detective Denny Delaney pitted against the arch-terrorist Felix the Cat. That was followed by a chill-packed sequel "Clawed Back from the Dead." Rooney's book about India, "The Daemon in Our Dreams" was a blend of the naturalistic and the paranormal. In "The Rice Queen Spy" he presented the life story of a British secret operative who was "outed" and later went on to live an openly gay life while thumbing his nose at the bureaucracy that had betrayed him. The author's work schedule includes a new Delaney effort.

He was born and educated in Springfield, Massachusetts (Classical High and American International College), went on to receive a master's degree in English from Columbia University, and finished course work for his Ph.D. at N.Y.U. He has written book reviews, and feature and travel articles for newspapers and magazines. He served in the U.S. Army as a military policeman in Times Square and Vienna, Austria, and in cities in U.S. Army AWOL apprehension.

His website is http://www.senneffhouse.com.