It was our first trip to a new country since we came back from traveling to 29 countries in 2019. Like a lot of people, we had things disrupted in the past few years, especially travel. Cruising to Norway was one of those things that T. and I had talked about doing for years, and when we weren't able to spend Christmas together, we decided to give each other this trip to the fjords.

Few countries in the world can have undergone as complete a peacetime transformation as Norway. While Norwegians' ...