Saturday May 12- We had a twelve hour stop in Rostock, Germany. The cruise ship was charging $25 Canadian per person for a shuttle into town. However when we spoke to the port security guard he told us there was a local bus around the corner. A day pass for this bus was $9 Canadian. Since Graham speaks German we assumed after his conversation with the bus driver that …
Thursday, May 10- at 6:15am the sun shone brightly as we walked around the upper deck. We were in Sweden, making our way through the archipelago towards the port in Stockholm. I’d never been to Sweden but it felt like I was passing cottages in the Muskokas; the rock formations, the islands, the trees and the buildings were so familiar. The ship docked at 8am. We quickly disembarked and …
We took the shuttle bus from the port and were dropped off in central Helsinki. We walked down the tree-lined Esplanade Avenue to the docks of Market Square. From the docks we boarded a small ferry headed to the Suomenlinna Sea Fortress. I now know why there are so many Finnish people in Northern Ontario. Here I was in Helsinki, Finland but it could easily have been a sunny …
Blessed with another sunny day in St. Petersburg, we boarded the tour minibus at 7:45am and headed to the river for a boat tour. The canals we saw were lined with beautiful palaces and often crossed by ornate bridges. The boat let us off at Catherine the Great’s Hermitage, which houses one of the world’s greatest collections of art; DiVinci, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Raphael and Botticelli to name a few. The …
