Lori's Travels

When we woke up this morning, we were still sailing to Riga. We weren’t due to reach the port until 11 a.m. The sky was overcast and the forecast was for rain. We started breakfast about 9:30 in the Reflections dining room, opting for a sit-down breakfast instead of the Windjammer buffet.

Due to the length of our ship, we couldn’t dock at the terminal near old town Riga, instead ending up next to a lumber yard in the industrial area, which is a 30-minute drive from town. Royal Caribbean provided free shuttle buses to take everyone into town. We had tickets for bus #18, which dropped us off near the old town about 12:30.

The old town was medical, similar to Tallinn, but not as extensive. We walked around using the Rick Steves guide again, until we decided it was time for a coffee stop. We found a nice outside table at a bar/restaurant on one of the town squares. It was warm, sunny, and somewhat humid, but very pleasant to sit outside. We had a leisurely coffee and decided to get lunch too.

But as we were nearing the end of our lunch, a thunderstorm started with hard rain. The umbrella over us did a fairly good job of keeping us dry, but many other bar customers were out in it. We paid and left during a relative slack period, but it soon started pouring again and we took shelter in a building’s arched portal. After a few minutes of waiting, it let up slightly and we trotted over the wet cobblestone streets toward the bus pickup point. We were lucky there was a Royal Caribbean bus waiting for us there. We were back on board by 4:45.

By the way, we weren’t thrown out of the formal-attired dinner in the dining room last night. We saw there were many others dressed like us. Dinner tonight will again be in the dining room at 8:30, where the expectation is for smart casual clothes. No problem!

It was another sunny morning on the Baltic when we woke up about 8 a.m. We ate breakfast and deboarded the ship about 10 a.m., immediately finding ourselves among Estonian souvenir stalls. We walked through, leaving the port area and reaching the old town of Tallinn in about 15 minutes.

We again followed the Rick Steves’ walking tour through the medieval and compact old town. It was very picaresque and well maintained, as well as full of tourists. There were four cruise ships at the port, so about 10,000 cruise passengers swarmed the town along with us.

We walked the cobbled streets and stopped to sample Estonian bakery goodies and coffee. We had read that marzipan had been invented in Tallinn, so we tried one of the bakery goodies with marzipan in it, as well as a decadent chocolate croissant and a wonderful creme and berry-filled cake roll. Then we walked around some more.

In the early afternoon, we stopped at an outdoor restaurant on one of the town squares, where we had some appetizer food and rehydrated with water. Then we made our leisurely way back to the ship, arriving about 2:30. The ship is leaving port relatively early today, so we had an all-aboard time set to 3:30. And that was OK, since we had wanted to make this an easier, shorter sightseeing day than the two in St. Petersburg.

Tonight is formal attire night in the dining room and we’ve decided to go there anyway, even though we only have sort-of-dressy clothes. After all, what can they do, kick us off the ship?

It was an extra early wakeup this morning because we had to meet Vadim by 7:30 for the second day of our tour. So we were up about 5:00, eating breakfast at 6:00, and deboarding the boat by 7:00. Today, we breezed through immigration easily. It was so different than yesterday. We made it to the pickup spot outside the terminal by 7:10 and waited for Vadim and Konstantin in the van. They arrived about 5 minutes later. The morning was sunny and slightly warmer than yesterday.

The first thing we did on today’s tour was take a boat ride on the Neva River with a few other TJ Travel groups. It was a one-hour ride on a low boat that could go under the bridges crossing the river. The lady guide’s English wasn’t as clear as Vadim’s, but it was pretty good.

Then we met Vadim again and went to the Hermitage, a huge museum kept in several old royal buildings including the Winter Palace. We were there for a couple of hours with Vadim telling us about the key pieces. We saw paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Raffael, as well as Egyptian sculptures and lots more. It is a huge collection that had been purchased by the czars while they were in power. We ate sandwiches at the Hermitage’s cafe at about 12:00 in order to make it to Catherine’s Palace in time for a 1 p.m. tour reservation for our group.

After a 40-minute drive, we arrived at Catherine’s Palace in the small town of Pushkin. The Palace is another museum that Vadim guided us through, which hasn’t been full restored after being substantially destroyed in World War II by the Germans. But it was beautiful and interesting. After going through its exhibits and the grounds, we drove to a nearby farmers market in the town of Pushkin. It had open stalls of many types of fruits and vegetables, plus everyday clothes and shoes, but nothing interested us. The fruit would have been interesting to try, but we can’t bring unpackaged food onboard the ship.

On the way back to the ship, we stopped at an Orthodox Church that is being used to look at the ornate inside. Then we were brought back to the cruise terminal about 4:30, where Vadim and Konstantin said goodbye. It was a breeze to go through immigration this time.

We watched from an outside upper deck as the ship manuevered out of the dock about 6:45. Then we retired to our staterooms before our 8:30 dinner.

We were scheduled to meet TJ Tours this morning at 8:30 for the first day of touring St Petersburg just after going through immigration at the cruise terminal. So we exited the boat about 8:00 after getting breakfast in the buffet at 7:00. But immigration was so painfully slow and frustrating! The lines didn’t look so long and they had plenty of immigration officers. But it took FOREVER. It was especially frustrating when, as we had nearly reached the front of the line, to have the immigration window close in front of us. We had to go to the back of another line. It took us 1 hour and 15 minutes to get through. Thankfully, TJ Tours, being a Russian company, knew the situation and had reassured us via email when we made the reservation that they would wait for us no matter how long it took. And they were there when we finally emerged.

Our guide is Vadim, a young man in his mid to late 20s, and our driver is Konstantin. There are 13 of us tourists total in the van and we’re all from the Royal Caribbean ship. One other family is from South Africa and there’s a couple from Italy. Vadim speaks quite good English and is a good guide. The weather was overcast, which is evidently typical for St. Petersburg, and in the 60s.

Here are the things we saw and/or experienced:

• The Neva River and it’s many bridges and additional canals, which make St Petersburg the “Venice of the North”
• St Isaac’s Cathedral
• The beautiful gardens, buildings and fountains on the huge grounds of Peterhof, on the shore of the Baltic Sea
• Riding the metro subway and seeing two of the beautiful subway stations
• The Church on Spilled Blood
• Lots of statues commemorating different Russian war victories and czars
• One of Vladimir Putin’s homes, which was quite large and on spacious and fenced grounds (which Vadim jokingly called “Putinhof”).
• The downtown area
• The FIFA Fan Fest before tonight’s Belgium-France World Cup match, taking place in front of the Church on Spilled Blood
• A lunch of traditional Russian dishes in a quaint downtown restaurant.

We returned to the cruise terminal about 7 p.m. being fairly worn out. We had to go through immigration again, which should have been a snap, but of course it took much longer than that. Back on the ship, the Danielson Bar opened in our stateroom, but drinks were limited to the remaining 2/3 of a bottle of the rose wine. We went to dinner at our assigned 8:30 dining time in the Reflections dining room and then crashed. We have an earlier reporting time for tomorrow’s second half of the TJ  Tours trip, and we have to through immigration yet again. So it will be an early wakeup tomorrow!

Today, our departure time from the ship was set for 11:30 a.m. to see the sights of Helsinki. The ship was still sailing through calm waters into port when we got up and dressed. We ate breakfast about 10 a.m. in the buffet, among a huge crowd of people. We ended up sitting outside since there were no more inside tables. It was sunny and in the 60s, pleasant weather. On the outdoor deck, we were greeted by a throng of aggressive seagulls continuously flying around, looking for bits of food. As soon as people would leave a table, the gulls would land to eat any food remaining on the plates.

Sometime before 11:30, we joined our 2400 other shipmates to leave the vessel. Most of them got into waiting tour buses, while we walked a ways to the nearest street to catch a city bus. The bus took us through the middle of town and beyond. We got off near the Rock Church, a circular church that was constructed by blasting it out of solid rock in 1969. We paid a small admission to go inside and look in the sanctuary. Underneath the church is a bomb shelter that holds 6000 people.

Then we went on Rick Steves’ walking tour of the city, seeing the Finlandia concert hall, the Esplanade shopping area, and the waterfront. We also stopped near the downtown central square for a coffee break in a coffee shop that was on the 2nd floor between a hotel and department store.

On the waterfront, we saw several different sightseeing and ferry boats, as well as the city hall, Swedish embassy, and the presidential palace.

We took two buses to return to the cruise terminal about 4:30. We had wanted to eat an early dinner then, since we hadn’t eaten lunch, but only one very small cafe was open on the ship and it had a huge line and no remaining tables. So we waited until 6:00 to get into the Windjammer buffet. We were the first ones and it never got really crowded. Most people probably went to the formal dinner that was scheduled in the regular dining room, but we hadn’t brought the formal clothes for that. So we enjoyed eating inside, with the ship just then pulling away from the pier.

Later, Gary and Halie went to a musical show featuring Broadway music, while the rest of us hung out in the cabins. We wanted to go to bed for an early start in the morning to see St Petersburg.