They met on a cruise ship, as many captains and their mates for life do. She was from Trinidad and Tobago. He was from Norway. Not exactly the blueprint for a match made in heaven…or even the Western Hemisphere.
"Sorry if I'm getting carried away," says Captain Tore Grimstad, whose ship is Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas, "but she is special."
He wasn't talking about his ship, which is special. He was talking about his wife, Lisa.
"She is as Norwegian as anyone — she speaks such beautiful Norwegian, even a dialect that I have, that people when they see her and have spoken to her on the telephone, you see the chin drop to the chest," he laughs, which he does a lot. "They say to her: 'You don't look like one of us…but you speak like a local!'"
They have been married 17 years now and their 15-year-old daughter, Anna, is being raised on the island as her father was. It's near Alesund, in western Norway, and is 
called Gurskoy/Hareid-Landet…actually two islands linked by a recently constructed underground tunnel. She and her mom have the man of the house at home every 10 weeks, for two and a half months between his Allure assignments.
Sometimes, they get to sail with him.
Sailing on another Royal Caribbean ship, Sovereign of the Seas, is where this trans-oceanic romance began. Tore was Chief Officer, Lisa worked in housekeeping. He took her home to Norway, then left on a contract at sea.
"I left her there and when came home four months later, I was blown away with all the words she knew, and the phrases," he says with pride. "She is musical. She's just good with languages. She already spoke a few languages from Trinidad. English is the mother tongue. A bit of Spanish….a bit of what they call gibberish…Creole, Patois. When she came to Norway, she immediately applied for work….got a job as a scaffolder in a shipyard. That little woman, she is amazing…climbing on the scaffolding on the outside the ships. She's a bit petite, so they sent her down in tanks to clean the inside so she was thrown right in there and nobody spoke English. She just had to learn Norwegian."
Language and scaffolding are only two of the things his wife learned in Norway. Her husband explains:
"They told her the scaffolding was to diminish but they needed truck drivers. So here she was, pregnant and driving a huge truck!"
Lisa took five years off after Anna's birth but today she still works in a shipyard.
"Now she's dealing a lot with customer sales and service," he says, "but she made a lot of sacrifices."
On the 10-week periods when they're together, the Grimstads spend a lot of time outdoors.
""I'm a dinosaur," he laughs. "I love to hike in nature…backpack…and when we say camping in the wilderness, it's real. Even midwinter, it's slightly cold but we do it."
Typical, you might say, for a Norwegian. For Lisa, that's nothing new.
Today at Phil Reimer's portsandbows.com: Christening the AmaSonata
Celebrity Reflection
15 nights
October 17, 2014
Rome, Funchal, St. Kitts, St. Maarten, Labadee, Miami
Inside $849
Cost per day: $56
www.celebritycruises.com