{"id":21281,"date":"2014-07-23T01:00:41","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T08:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cruisingdoneright.com\/?p=21281"},"modified":"2014-07-23T01:00:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T08:00:41","slug":"wednesday-23-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/?p=21281","title":{"rendered":"The Captain's 'Norwegian' wife"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

"Sorry if I'm getting carried away," says Captain Tore Grimstad, whose ship is Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas<\/a>, "but she is special."<\/p>\n

He wasn't talking about his ship, which is special. He was talking about his wife, Lisa.<\/p>\n

"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!'"<\/p>\n

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 \"Capt.<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, they get to sail with him.<\/p>\n

Sailing on another Royal Caribbean<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

"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."<\/p>\n

Language and scaffolding are only two of the things his wife learned in Norway. Her husband explains:<\/p>\n

"They told her the scaffolding was to diminish but they needed truck drivers. So here she was, pregnant and driving a huge truck!"<\/p>\n

Lisa took five years off after Anna's birth but today she still works in a shipyard.<\/p>\n

"Now she's dealing a lot with customer sales and service," he says, "but she made a lot of sacrifices."<\/p>\n

On the 10-week periods when they're together, the Grimstads spend a lot of time outdoors.<\/p>\n

""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."<\/p>\n

Typical, you might say, for a Norwegian. For Lisa, that's nothing new.<\/p>\n

Today at Phil Reimer's <\/span><\/a>portsandbows.co<\/span><\/a>m: Christening the AmaSonata<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Celebrity Reflection<\/a>
\n\t15 nights<\/span>
\n\tOctober 17, 2014<\/span>
\n\tRome<\/a>, <\/span>Funchal<\/a>, <\/span>St. Kitts<\/a>, <\/span>St. Maarten<\/a>, <\/span>Labadee<\/a>, <\/span>Miami<\/a>
\n\tInside $849<\/span>
\n\tCost per day: $56<\/strong><\/span>
\n\twww.celebritycruises.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading The Captain's 'Norwegian' wife<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,19,15],"tags":[203,1673,138,809,912,72,35,881,26,27,33,148],"class_list":["post-21281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deals","category-people","category-ships","category-stories","tag-allure-of-the-seas","tag-captain-tore-grimstad","tag-celebrity-cruises","tag-celebrity-reflection","tag-cruise-bargains","tag-cruise-deals","tag-cruises","tag-norway","tag-phil-reimer","tag-ports-and-bows","tag-royal-caribbean","tag-transatlantic-cruises","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}