Bountiful Botanicals

The next day was a simple day at sea. This means catching up on laundry, maybe some pool time and school work.

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Then we landed in the city of Tromso! The port for the ship is a bit from the city center, and we were too cheap to pay for a $20/person Princess shuttle. So we decided we would walk until we found something interesting. This is something that I have found to be true with all of our travels. Pretty much everywhere there is something interesting or a story to be listened to. If you just relax and allow yourself to be open and curious, you will find something fun, exciting or interesting.

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Like magic, we stumbled upon a FANTASTIC botanical garden called the Artic-Alpine Botanic Garden. I wouldn’t normally get too excited about such things because I know nothing about flowers, but this turned into a bit of an unexpected learning opportunity.

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During our botanical walk-about, we saw quite a few people pulling something from the ground. I encouraged Owen to ask what they were doing. He discovered they were pulling Horsetail from the garden. This is a native species that has been around since the Jurassic period, over 100 million years ago.

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They pull this species from the garden two times a year, June and September. It grows like crazy and will take over the non-native plants. It actually reproduces with spores, which I thought was fascinating. Owen pulled a ton and had some adorable conversations with some of the local volunteers/staff of the park.

One of the leaders of the garden said, “We take out the winners to help the losers.” We heard all types of theories about Horsetail. Like it’s used to make tea to help with jaundice, or to increase vitality, but upon my thorough Google research, none of this has been proven to work for humans. Perhaps, Horsetail produces a fantastic placebo effect on humans. However, Horsetail was an EXCELLENT source of food with lots of nutrients for a dinosaur diet.

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Something Horsetail, or Equisetum, has contributed to humankind is sparking the idea for the creation of logarithms. For all my math and comp sci friends out there, this little plant helped to spur the tech era. From dinosaurs to computers, this plant has done it all. Apparently, the pattern of how its nodes are spaced, as those nearing the apex of the shoot are increasingly close together, is said to have inspired John Napier to invent logarithms.

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After our botanical education session, we went back to the ship and let the boys have a fun day with no school work. Jeffrey and I decided we were going to participate in a game show on the ship in front of a live audience.

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Jeff and I were on different teams. Our first challenge was to shake ping-pong balls out of a box with two holes strapped to our backs. We simply had to shake our bodies until the balls came out. WELL, very interesting. Below you will see a video of us shaking.

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Big win for Katie, as I didn’t stop moving once. Jeff on the other hand had to take a big rest break after 45 seconds where he stopped moving pretty much all together. Big loss for Katie, after about 15 seconds of JUMPING and SHAKING, my sweet body kindly reminded me that I had children, meaning every shake or jump caused a small amount of urine to seep out of me. By the time I was done, I was absolutely terrified that I had just peed my pants in front of everyone.

As I secretly kept trying to check if it was noticeable under the bright lights, we finished the game, and Jeff’s team was the big winner! He received 2 bottle of champagne! After we got back in the room, I immediately decided to change my pee-pants, as any adult would do. HOWEVER, Jeff said, “Why are you changing, it’s not a lot and we are going to the casino so your going to get smokey. We just did laundry, don’t ruin another pair of pants so soon.”

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What the literal f**k!!! It felt like a TON and I let him know that is incredibly gross, and I don’t want to go to the casino in pee-pants. I’m not 3!

All this to say, I changed my pants and we had a good time getting my new clean pants smokey.