BALTIC SEA CRUISE
HOUSTON , TX TO ENGLAND, CRUISE TO ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA AND RETURN TO LONDON, ENGLAND AND HOUSTON, TX
MAY 20 – JUNE 8, 2005

Fly to England, Friday, May 20, 2005  

     Angela and I and Neal and Leona Pleasant flew to London on Friday about 4pm, landing at Gatwick about 7am on Saturday.  It was not a smooth flight, and Angela and I did not sleep all night.  The time change was 6 hours, so we set our watches ahead by 6 hours.

Depart Dover, England, Saturday, May 21, 2005

     We met the Celebrity Cruise Lines representative at the airport and boarded a bus which took us overland to Dover, England.  There were some traffic problems and delays, and we took back roads for part of the 2.5 hour trip.  It was Spring in England (and everywhere else we went on the cruise).  Trees and plants had new growth and that light green Springtime color.  Seeing the white cliffs of Dover for the first time was a treat.



     We had lunch on the ship and waited for our luggage.  When it arrived, we unpacked and tried to stow away all the clothes we had brought.  The size of our stateroom was a big disappointment – it was the smallest yet out of three cruises for us.  We had luggage that could be fitted inside other luggage pieces, and there was room under the bed for the luggage.  We did the life preserver, muster station drill and dressed for dinner.  The food was generally good on the entire cruise.  We moved our clocks ahead one hour.

Day At Sea, Sunday, May 22, 2005

     Angela and I did not sleep well, but once I got to sleep I slept all day.  Angela woke at 4:30am and went back to bed around 11 or 12am.  We got up at 4:30pm.  The Captain’s Toast was that evening, and we did not get back to our stateroom until midnight.  We shared a table for 4 with Neal and Leona, and they preferred the Late Seating option, so usually we were beginning dinner at 8:30pm .  The evening’s entertainment was sometimes before dinner but often was after dinner, as it was on that day.  We got a newsletter delivered to our stateroom each evening that told about the schedule for the following day.



Copenhagen, Denmark, Monday, May 23, 2005

     The ship came into the harbor at 7am.  After breakfast we had a shore excursion from 9:30am until after 1:00pm.  We were on the same shore excursions with Neal and Leona every day except the last one, so we generally were together.  The shore excursions were optional, extra-charge trips with an English-speaking guide and a bus driver.  We were shown the highlights of the City, and the guide usually explained to us some of the history of the area.  The differences in our currencies were usually discussed, as well as the economy and the politics of the country we were visiting. 



     In Copenhagen, we wanted to take a harbor tour but could not due to a scheduling problem.  Copenhagen is a city built on a series of islands, as are Stockholm, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg.  West of Copenhagen, Denmark has a substantial section of its country on the mainland, where it has a border with Germany.  That section of Denmark divides the Baltic coast of Germany into a western and an eastern section.  Hamburg, Germany, for example is on the western section.  Our second port was on the eastern section of the German coast.



     That evening our entertainment was before dinner.  Angela and I both took an afternoon nap, so it was 2am before we could get to sleep.  We were struggling with the time change (jet lag) and had a hard time adjusting to it.





     We had a little rain on the morning tour, but it was very light.  Generally it was cool for us, with a daytime high in the 60s.  Occasionally the high temperature (degrees F) was in the 50s, and we had one day with a high in the mid-70s.  It was overcast most days, and the weather was typical for the time of year in that area.  Throughout the cruise we had very little rain.

Warnemunde, Germany, Tuesday, May 24, 2005

     That was Angela’s birthday, and we did not schedule a shore excursion for that day.  Warnemunde was a coastal tourist spot, and Rostock was a nearby industrial town with a history of ship-building.  We got off the ship and walked around in Warnemunde, but we did not take the train to nearby Rostock.  Neither did we avail ourselves of an optional shore excursion to Berlin.  That involved an early start and a long train ride (about 3.5 hours each way), so we gave it a miss.



     We had some sun and clouds on our visit, and we had a cool breeze.  The town was cute, and we enjoyed seeing it.  We bought a few postcards, but we did not mail them.  We went back to the ship for lunch and an afternoon nap.



     That evening we had dinner at 7pm and had birthday cake for Angela's birthday.  The evening's entertainment was watching the movie, “The Bourne Supremacy”, on the large screen in the Celebrity theatre.  One complaint about that – the audio was not good for the low voices in the dialog, and we could not understand what the actors were saying.  Fortunately it was long on action and short on dialog anyway.



     The Celebrity theatre was one of the best I had ever seen.  The ship was built in 2002, and the theatre had every conceivable lighting possibility along with a stage that had sections which would rotate or go up or down or both.  The 4 shows done by the Celebrity Singers and Dancers were unusual in their special effects involving the lighting and the stage.  Because of the Berlin trip, I imagine, the ship left the dock at 9:30pm; and the movie was the entertainment because 80% of the passengers did go to Berlin .





     On our second cruise we had been disappointed to not find a musical group to listen to in the evenings.  The Celebrity Constellation had a quartet that filled that need for us.  They played classical music, movie themes, romantic songs; and all were instrumental.  We enjoyed that type of music.  Neal and Leona liked to dance, and the ship had several options for dancing.

     Celebrity had made a deal with Cirque de Soleil to do something new in their most forward lounge on Deck 11.  It was called The Bar at the Edge of the Earth.  The Cirque de Soleil characters “appeared” at the bar and “interacted” with the passengers.  Their costumes were unusual and interesting, but overall I was not interested in the performance.  During a few of the Celebrity Dancers’ shows two of the Cirque de Soleil performers participated in a more usual way, showing off their amazing abilities in acrobatic shows.



     From 5:30 to 6:30pm we enjoyed a German band in the Bar at the Edge of the Earth, along with some German food.  After the movie we listened to our favorite quartet.

At Sea, Wednesday, May 25, 2005

     We got up and had breakfast in our stateroom and then went back to bed.  I was experiencing a sore throat and a cough.  Angela slept later than I did, so we had lunch in our stateroom as well.  They said you could order from an interactive menu on the stateroom TV, but I found that impossible to do.  The interactive TV was simplistic and amateurish, and even checking your bill was difficult on that system.

     We checked our email on the ship’s internet service, which was very expensive at $0.75 per minute while you were online.  They also offered classes to learn about computers, but they were expensive as well.  The ship offered a number of things that seemed to us to be expensive, such as a massage for 50 minutes for $135.  Some things, like a yoga session or a jog in the morning were $10 or $15 extra, and we felt they were overcharging for the extras.

     At the coffee bar, they did not offer free coffee but instead had cappuccino, espresso, coffee with alcohol, etc – all at a high price.  They did have free coffee and iced tea on Deck 10 (the buffet deck) at all times.  They did have the fountain soft-drink program we had used on our first two cruises.  It was priced at $5 per day, plus 15% service charge, or about $87 for the cruise, which was more expensive than Holland America or Princess.  Also it was sometimes hard to get, because you had to find a “drinks” waiter to get the soft drink – a food waiter could not get the diet coke because it had to come from the bar.  A can of Diet Coke from the room mini-bar was $1.95 plus 15% service charge.

     Entertainment that night was a xylophone player, who was good; but he had a mean look on his face during the whole performance.  Also he kept trying to get us to applaud more, which got to be tiresome.  Several of the performers demanded that we applaud more loudly, or answer back to them when they said “Hello”, etc, which I took exception to.  We were not on the ship to make their day; they were there to entertain us, it seemed to me.

Stockholm, Sweden, Thursday, May 26, 2005



     The ship docked at 8:30am.  We had breakfast and went ashore for a city tour at 9:15.  It lasted until 12:30.  The big event was seeing the Vasa Museum, in which Sweden’s one remaining 17^th century warship was displayed.  It’s an unusual museum, because the ship only operated for about 10 minutes before it sank, in sight of where it was launched.  Then it stayed underwater for over 300 years until it was raised in 1961.  The museum was built in 1990, and it was dark and very confusing in its layout.  The rest of Stockholm was much more attractive than the Vasa and its museum.





     I liked Stockholm.  It was a very attractive city.  We were docked near a high hill, which is unusual – most of the land we saw was very flat.  The tour bus went up the hill and stopped so we could see the downtown and get a feeling for the locks and the waterways which encircle the downtown area.  After lunch we did a harbor tour in a small boat.  We went through the locks into a lake, then went around some of the islands, and went back to the sea through a different set of locks.





     We took a nap and saw the second large-scale production with the Celebrity singers and dancers, and then we had dinner.  We were told to advance our clocks again by one hour, the second time we had done that since boarding the ship.  

     My cough, sore throat, and runny nose were at their worst that day.  I woke up feeling bad, but at the end of the day I was better.  At the end of the first tour I stopped at the clinic to see the doctor and get some antibiotics.  The Clinic was closed between noon and 5pm, I believe.  By 5pm I was not as interested in going there.

Riga, Latvia, Friday, May 27, 2005

     Docking was scheduled for 10am, and our tour was scheduled for 10:30am.  We had coffee in our stateroom at 8am, and we went to breakfast at 9am.  For some reason the dining room closed early that day, so we ate at the buffet on Deck 10.



     It was warm and windy in Riga; I wore a short-sleeved shirt and took a jacket.  Riga was interesting, and I’m glad we got to see it.  The City was being renovated, and some of the architecture downtown was very nice.  The worn out factories on our way to the downtown needed to be torn down, I think, or rehabilitated.  We were docked a ways from the center of the City, and once we crossed the river into the City proper, we could feel the energy of the renovations going on there.



     Angela had gotten up at 3:30am, so we were not over the jet lag yet.  We were back aboard at 1:30pm and had lunch in the main dining room.  Usually we were seated with two or three other couples at lunch.  Many of those couples were from England. Many were older than we were.  We enjoyed talking to those people; they were all very pleasant and interesting.



     Angela slept more than I did in the afternoon.  My cough and sore throat were better, and my runny nose was now stopped up.  The ship left Riga at 5pm.  We had dinner at 8:30pm, and the entertainment was at 10:45pm for us.  Lindsay Hamilton, from England, was a great singer who performed twice on the cruise.









Tallinn, Estonia, Saturday, May 28, 2005

     The ship docked at 10am.  We had a 4-hour tour beginning at 11am, so we ate a big breakfast.  Our tour guide was a cute young lady who told us some interesting things about life under the Soviet rule.  Estonia had a population of 1.3 million people, which I found interesting. Texas has over 20 million people, and greater Houston’s population is 4 million.  Imagine starting a country with a total population of less than half that of the City of Houston.  The history of that area shows that the small Baltic countries could not defend themselves and so became the pawns of Sweden, Germany, Denmark, or Russia, whoever wanted them at the time.



     Tallinn had 400,000 people.  As we drove up to a very rocky area, the tour guide called it a limestone plateau where nothing would grow.  The Russians built large blocks of apartment buildings there, and half of Tallinn’s population lived there.  She said it was difficult to have friends over because they had trouble finding your apartment – all the buildings looked alike.  And of course there were no trees due to the rocky soils.  

     She also said that to subdue the population, after Russia became in charge, the top 10% of the people, based on IQ, were snatched from their beds one night and sent to Siberia, never to return.  It is hard to imagine living where a wrong statement or action could get you sent to Siberia.  The people looked different to me after that.



   Tallinn had some medieval building and forts which provided for a very interesting tour.  See the photos of the Old Town.  The port was quite modern, although apparently unemployment and drugs are a current problem there.  Helsinki, Finland is only 50 miles away by water, and they have a lot of ferries in the Baltic.  The Finns come to Tallinn to buy groceries and booze, and then they return – by ferry.



     Our tour guide explained that the Estonians were singers, and singing is a big part of their lives.  We went to an outdoor amphitheatre where the people meet in large numbers to sing together.   It was sunny and warm, unless you were out of the sun, where it was cool.



     We got back to the ship at 3pm and had lunch and a short nap.  Entertainment at 7pm was a concert pianist, who was probably brilliant.  We had dinner at 8:30pm and spent a restless night.  We were told again to move our clocks ahead by one hour, and the next day was the big event for that cruise – the tour of St. Petersburg, Russia.

St. Petersburg, Russia, Sunday, May 29, 2005

     We had rolls and coffee delivered to our room at 6am, and we met the others on our tour at The Bar at the Edge of the Earth at 8:15am.  A Russian band was playing on the dock as we waited in line for the Russian officials to review our documents and issue a shore pass to us.



     The lady guide took us to the Hermitage, which was large and very popular with tourists.  I got the impression the leaders in Russia accumulated a lot in the way of art objects, while keeping their subjects in a position of poverty.  The apartment blocks, the streets and street cars, and the public buildings were old and needed maintenance.  We got several photos during the day, but photos were not allowed inside the museums.  We had lunch, but I’m not sure what we ate.  It was simply served to us; there was no menu to choose from.







     We had dinner on Deck 10 about 6:30pm, right after coming back from the day-long tour.  Entertainment that night was the showing of the movie “Anna Karenina”, the classical novel written by Leo Tolstoy, which Angela had read.

St. Petersburg, Russia, Monday, May 30, 2005 – Sick Day

     We were up at 6:15am, ready for a second day touring St. Petersburg.  Our travel agent had recommended and sold Leona on “their” tour of the city, which meant it was not purchased through the cruise line.  I’m not sure why, because the cruise line also offered all-day tours as well.  But lots of people did that.

     I was tired when I got up, but thought little of it.  We ordered and ate a complete breakfast, since we were to begin our tour early.  I ate and showered, and I became so tired I could not get myself out of the shower.  Angela called the Medical Clinic, and they sent a team to our stateroom.  They checked vital signs and then moved me, in a wheelchair, to the Clinic on the lower floor.

     As Neal and Leona and the rest of our tour departed, the doctors and nurses tried to figure out what was wrong with me.  Nothing was obviously wrong.  My blood pressure was initially okay but continued to decline over the couple of hours I was in the clinic, and I now think that low blood pressure was the reason I was having trouble.  One of the nurses told me I was taking three medications that could lower my blood pressure.  When we returned home, my doctor, who had prescribed all three of those medications, changed one pill to one that hopefully would not cause that problem.

     By 9:30 we were back in our stateroom, and I slept on and off until noon.  We ate lunch in the stateroom, slept some more, and returned to the Clinic as ordered to have some more tests run.  They didn’t find anything wrong, charged me $1,500, and we went on to the evening’s entertainment at 7pm, which was a comic.  At 8:30 we joined Neal and Leona for dinner and later set our clocks back one hour.

     The Clinic gave me a written ”excuse” to have my shore excursion fee returned due to medical reasons, but that did me no good with our travel agent, so we lost $299.  Next time I will buy shore excursions only through the cruise line.

     The photos below are courtesy of our friends Bill and Bev from Ohio.

     The following pictures were taken at Peter the Great's Castle at Peterhoff.











Helsinki, Finland, Tuesday, May 31, 2005

     The ship arrived at 7am.  We were up early and watched the ship approach the City through a large group of islands.  Our first tour was 8:30 through 11:30am.  We saw and walked around the Monument to Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), the most notable composer in the history of Finnish music and one of the most influential men in Finnish culture.  Then we ate lunch at the buffet on Deck 10.  Our afternoon tour was a waterways cruise that I really enjoyed.  We went around a group of islands, and the final leg of the tour was through a very tight and small passage through the rocks.  That cruise ran from 1pm until 3:30pm.













     We rested and then ate dinner at the buffet on Deck 10 at 6:30 .  Then we checked email and listened to our favorite quartet until the evening’s show at 8:30pm.  I enjoyed Helsinki.  I particularly liked some of the scenes on the waterways and on the streets in the downtown area.

Klaipeda, Lithuania, Wednesday, June 1, 2005

     The ship docked at 10am, and our tour began at 11:30am.  It was a 4.5 hour tour.  It was interesting, but not very.  Many of the signs or labels we saw in a museum were not in English, so we could not read them. They usually could not accept our money, so we couldn’t buy anything.  The area seemed to not be ready for tourism.  That was the last port for a shore excursion on our cruise.







     It was cool – 53 degrees F – sunny and breezy.  Like many days on the cruise, in the sun we were fine or too warm, and out of the sun we were glad to have jacket to wear.  I still had symptoms of a head cold.

     We had tea at 4:30 on Deck 10.  Dinner was at 8:30pm, and the ship was rolling with some rough seas.  Entertainment at 10:45pm was a magician.  We were told to turn our clocks back one hour. 

At Sea, Thursday, June 2, 2005

     We had a slow, easy morning.  Our big project for the day was to get our photos off of our chip in the digital camera and onto a CD.  That turned out to be a big deal, and we spent a lot of time getting it done.  I’m not an expert at doing that, and neither was anyone else on the photo lab staff.  We went under the East Denmark Bridge, a long, high bridge connecting Denmark with the rest of the world.  It was interesting that our ship could get under the bridge.  It was cool and foggy.



     We met a couple named Bill and Bev – not sure of their last name or how to reach them – from Ohio.  They were on our first day’s tour in St. Petersburg and had missed us on the second day.  We told them what had happened on the second day, and Bill offered to share his photos of the day with us.  Sure enough, later he delivered to our stateroom, at a time when we were not there, a CD with all the pictures he took on that day.  We never saw them again.  I’d like to thank them if I could locate them; it was such a caring thing to do.

     I was trying to finish a library book, John Adams, by David McCoullough, which was good but so long that I could not read it all.  The ship’s library said they wanted all books returned by early that evening, but they also said that the next evening.  I was disappointed that I had done what they asked the first time they asked it.  David McCoullough had written a marvelous book on the Panama Canal that I read in 2002.  He was an excellent, award-winning author of historical and biographical books.

     The evening’s attire was “formal”, and we had dinner at 6pm followed by the show at 8:30pm.  As the ship became wrapped in fog, we were told to turn our clocks back one hour.

At Sea, Friday, June 3, 2005

     It was foggy and cool outside.  We had breakfast and lunch on Deck 10, and we began the packing phase of our cruise that afternoon.  We also got some envelopes and prepared tips for the people we were supposed to tip.  On Celebrity the tipping was strongly encouraged but was voluntary.  (On Princess it was obligatory, which I did not like.  To me that's an extra charge, not a tip.)

     We had dinner with Neal and Leona at 6pm, and the entertainment was at 9pm.  I think we were ready to get off the ship.

Arrive Dover and transfer to London, England, Saturday, June 4, 2005

     The ship docked at 4am, although I did not see it happen.  We were up at 6 and ready to disembark at 8:30am.  It went fairly smoothly; the bus to London departed at 9:30am.  The bus dropped us at Victoria Station, although it was not that simple.  There was a Victoria Station for trains and another one for buses.  The Victoria Station for buses spread itself out over two city blocks.  Getting a taxi was not easy or inexpensive.

     We went to the hotel separate from Neal and Leona and found them already there registering for their room, which was not ready then.  We went back and forth with the front desk to upgrade and get a larger room with air conditioning.  Neal and Leona did the same.  We eventually got nice rooms in the hotel, which was in the Kensington Gardens area.  The gardens were right across the street from our hotel, and they adjoined Hyde Park to the east.

     The four of us walked around the area, down Kensington High Street; and we had lunch at a "pub". Later we had a coffee on the street and checked out an internet café.  We walked in the Kensington Gardens and then ate dinner at a small Italian restaurant we spotted earlier.  It was pretty good, but we were keenly aware how much the US dollar had declined in value – 30% over the last two years.  Everything was expensive to us.  Also, we had become accustomed to no smoking in restaurants in the USA; in England there were no NO SMOKING restaurants.  Often the restaurants had no areas set aside for non-smoking guests.  Even worse, the restaurants tended to have no air circulation, and almost all of them were unbelievably smoky.

London, England, Sunday, June 5, 2005

     We met Neal and Leona for a 10:30 am appointment for a Hop-on, Hop-off double-decker tour bus.  We had earphones and a choice of eight languages to hear the narration as we drove all over London.  We had lunch at St. Katharine Dock Marina, and then we took a cruise on the River Thames, included in the bus tour.  (I called it the Thames River until I received an email from my UK friend, Dot Hart, who advised me to say it the other way.  Thanks for the input!)  We ate at a restaurant near our hotel and walked back in light rain.  We were tired after a long day with a fair amount of walking.

















Oxford, England, Monday, June 6, 2005

     On Monday I took a cab to the Marylebone train station and then took a train to Oxford.  I visited a prospective customer there and had lunch with them.  I took the train back to London and arrived at the hotel about 5pm.  After a short rest we went out for dinner at a very smoky restaurant near the hotel.

London, England, Tuesday, June 7, 2005

     Angela wanted to see the Royal Botanical Gardens, and so about 9:30am we took the Tube to go see Kew Gardens.  It was a pleasant time with some of the nicest weather we had all week.  Unfortunately, for some strange reason, I took a blood pressure pill midday on Monday, and I was tired and weak.  After a light lunch at the gardens, I sat down and read a book while Angela pursued some special interests of hers.  I sat outside in the sun and read and enjoyed myself.  I remember thinking you could wear anything - black clothes, if you wanted to, and you would still enjoy the sun and the cool breeze that day.

     Throughout the gardens were interwoven these pretty glass sculptures made by Dale Chihuly, a famous glass blower and artist.  They were truly spectacular and a pleasant surprise for us.









     About 3pm we took the tube to Little Venice, where we found the canal park.  We paid for a ride on an old canal boat, which took us east to Camden Lock and Camden train station.  We rode the tube back to the hotel, changing trains twice along the way.  We were proud of ourselves for managing the system to the extent that we did.  After a short rest, we had dinner and packed for travel home.











London, England to Houston, TX, USA, Wednesday, June 8, 2005

     We took another expensive taxi, that time to Gatwick Airport, beginning about 9:30am.  We checked in at 11am and read a book until it was time to board the plane.  The flight was better than the flight over to England, and we landed around 5:30pm.  My son Chuck picked us up and took us home.  We were happy to have Chili’s (my favorite restaurant) take-out to eat at home.

     I was glad to see some of the places we visited along the way.  The weather was cooler than we were used to, but sometimes it was very pleasant.  It was never very inviting to sunbath or swim on the ship, and our feelings about the ship were mixed.  We liked some things, liked the food (sometimes); and we disliked some things, like the small stateroom.  I think I was a little bored at times, and I’m not sure why that was, comparing this cruise with our two previous cruises.  I am a “people person”, and on the previous cruises there were more people that we knew on the cruise with us – that may have had something to do with it.

     At any rate, it was a grand experience, one that we probably would not have done if Leona had not suggested it.  I’m glad we went and saw the places we saw, and I have a better idea of the kinds of things that I do and do not enjoy on a cruise.  As I get older it seems I am better able to look for the good in the experience, and there was plenty of good on this cruise.  I look forward to the next one.