Russia

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Ok, so I'm leaving tomorrow. There was a last minute flight change. NO stress at all. Was texted at 3:00am from the airlines saying my flight from Chicago to Helsinki was cancelled. No big deal, right?!?! Well, luckily the flight was automatically re-routed through London. Now flying Knoxville to Chicago to London to Moscow. So I'm getting there an hour later, no problem considering I thought the whole trip might be cancelled. Minor freak out. The upside being I don't have to deal with the Helsinki airport until my flight home. Heathrow will be much easier to negotiate on my flight to Moscow. Yay for English.

I have all of my tours scheduled, so I'm getting to see pretty much what I wanted to see. All booked online. One minor snafu where I schedule St. Isaacs cathedral on the wrong day, but quickly got that corrected. Realized I'm flying out of St. Petersburg on my way home in the evening, so I pretty much have an extra day there. So, I booked a tour to Catherine's Palace, which I really wanted to do anyway, but now I have a good reason.

I ended up booking a private car from my Airbnb in Moscow to the train station at 5:00 am since the first train doesn't leave the local station until almost 6:00 and my train leaves Moscow at 7:00 am. Too close for comfort. So, I'm feeling good about that decision, it was about $20, but worth the not worrying about making the train station and figuring out where to go in time to catch my 7:00 train. I also booked a private car from St. Petersburg to the airport there since there is no train and I didn't want to take a chance of missing my flight back home. That will be about $60, but they pick me up and drop me off at the airport at my convenience, so hey, I'm worth it.

I've obsessively planned all my stops and metro trips and have added them to my itinerary. The Moscow metro app is priceless.

Hopefully will be blogging from Russia in a day or two. Here's hoping the wifi is good and I have the time and energy to record every minute of the trip. Thanks to every one for the support, especially Mike and thanks to Dawn for the selfie stick so I can take lame solo-trip pics.

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