Today is definitely a “tour bus” day as we do not have individual visas and a guide and can not go off on our own without a visa. The ship has obtained group visas for us to get off the ship and onto the tour buses with guides… so here we go… it’s about 20 minutes from the docks into St. Petersburg and we are doing a “whirlwind” 2 days. First of all St. Petersburg is known as the “Venice of the North” as it was built on marshland and 42 islands are connected by canals and bridges. We cross the Neva River many times during the day and lesser bridges as we see churches, government buildings and shopping districts. One question we were asked before we left was, “do they dress differently in Russia. The ... read more

The sun sets at about 11:30pm and rises again at 4:30am. So… we never see night anymore. We’re in bed before the sun goes down and we don’t get up till it rises again… very strange ;-) We never leave our stateroom without sunglasses! Well, we have been VERY lucky once again. The three ships before us had to skip Stockholm as it was too foggy to navigate the 58 miles of islands that are the entrance to the port of Stockholm. But for us, the sun came out and it was 85 degrees and sunny. The Swedes think it will be the hottest day of the year. Stockholm is beautiful, very green with thousands and thousands of islands. There are 700,000 registered boats for 1 .5 million people ;-) We saw the old town with ... read more

Hi Blog Readers, we have made it to the capitol of the Czech Republic, Prague. We took the 9 am train from Salzburg to Vienna (Wien) and then hopped a Czech train to Prague. We thought we were going to have to change train stations in Vienna (by using the metro) but we lucked out and train #61 our train, went right to Wien Mielding where we needed to catch the train to Prague...Yea! Arrived at about 5pm. Dragan, a young man from Slovenia was at the station to meet us and took us straight to our apartment in "Little City", a perfect location. Walking distance to everything. We are right across the street from St. Nicholas church and just a couple of blocks from an ATM, Starbucks, great Czech restaurants, the "castle" and Old Town. ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, time to answer a few questions... 1) In some of the pictures, I see "dots" on your shirts, what are they? A) Those are the stickers that you must wear when you are on a "tour". This way the guide knows who's in their group. 2)In Barcelona, you are wearing something around your neck, what is it? A) These are called "Whispers" and they have earpieces like on an IPOD. The leader of a tour group talks into a microphone and you can hear them. They are really great as you can wander a little way from the group to take pictures, or whatever, and still hear the leader and not get lost ;-) 3)Is it hard to get your train reservations? A) Good question. It is sometimes hard to figure out who ... read more

Florence, Italy. Although there were a great many things to see in Rome, we are so happy to leave the big city and find ourselves two train hours north in lovely Florence-we don’t miss all the traffic and mobs of people at all!!! We got off the train and dragged our bags about a half mile to the Piazza della Indipendenza to the Hotel Caravaggio. (Thank you Claudia for the referral) The sidewalks are uneven and very narrow so it’s always a challenge to move bags all over the city, so we were happy to get to this lovely old hotel with 38 rooms. We had a choice of “view of the Duomo” or a “bathtub”. The bathtub won ;-) it even has jets! We still have a lovely view of the park and hills around ... read more