[spacer height=”20px”]Saturday, August 25 was our last port stop on our 9-day Baltic Sea cruise, not counting our final stop at the end back in Copenhagen. We docked in Nynäshamn, a port some 40 miles outside Stockholm, for the simple reason that Stockholm doesn’t have the capacity to dock every cruise ship that wants to pay a port… Read More »
Friday, August 24 brought us to Helsinki, Finland. We had no issues whatsoever getting off the ship, unlike the Grand Guignol folly back in St Petersburg. Our Finland “exclusive tour” was another bus tour to see the sights… both in Helsinki, proper, and in the quaint little town of Porvoo a half hour away to the east. Oh,… Read More »
Thursday, August 23 saw us still in St Petersburg — Day 9 of our vacation and day 5 of our cruise. We spent the day back onshore, dragging around St Petersburg and environs looking at gilt. The Russians of the Russian Empire period never saw anything they didn’t want to cover in gold leaf. We spent the morning at a… Read More »
On Wednesday, August 22, the Furrs sailed into the grips of what had once been known as the Evil Empire: Russia. St Petersburg, Russia, to be exact. And I remember the first words I uttered as opened the stateroom curtains and looked blankly toward the shore: “That’s one tall building.” The Russian need to overcompensate for perceived inferiority… Read More »
Tuesday, August 21, was the seventh day of our vacation, and the fourth day of our nine-day Baltic Sea cruise. We would spend the next four days in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Finland, stopping off in Estonia’s capital Tallin, then spending two days in St. Petersburg, Russia, and then finishing with a day in Finland’s… Read More »
Monday, August 20 was the sixth day of our vacation, and the third day of our nine-day Baltic Sea cruise. It was one of our two “sea days” — days without a port call — and we spent it transiting the eastern Baltic Sea, having left Rostock, Germany around midnight the night before and not arriving in Tallinn,… Read More »
Sunday, August 19 was the first full day of our nine-day Baltic cruise, and when I say “fulI” mean full. It was one hell of a long day. We docked in Warnemunde (the port of the city of Rostock), on the coast, and took a train three hours south to Berlin. We were driven all over the city in… Read More »
[spacer height=”20px”]Saturday, August 18 was the first day of our nine-day Baltic Sea cruise aboard the “Norwegian Breakaway”, a big-ass cruise ship decorated from end to end in New York-oriented stuff. Most of the year it serves the New York market, but for some reason did a series of back to back summer 2018 cruises out of Copenhagen… Read More »
Friday, August 17 was our first full day in Copenhagen and the last day before we embarked on our nine-day Baltic Sea cruise. We kept things simple and didn’t try to do too much; mostly we wandered around the legendary Tivoli Gardens amusement park and dodged a couple of showers. Tivoli Gardens is the second-oldest amusement park in… Read More »
[spacer height=”20px”]Day 2 of our Baltic Sea vacation was our first day in Denmark. Our red-eye flight from Chicago got us to Copenhagen at 1 pm local time, which actually worked out well. By the time we got our bags (all four made it! yeah!) and caught a train from the airport to Copenhagen’s central rail station downtown,… Read More »