At the end of June 2010, Mike and Sandy joined a group of 28 folks from their church for a Baltic Sea cruise. They flew to Copenhagen for a few days sightseeing before boarding the Star Princess, our floating home for 10 days.
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The Star Princess carries 2600 passengers, and is a sister ship to the Grand Princess, which took Mike and Sandy around the Carribbean back in 1999. It's quite impressive, and its size didn't cause any problems at all. They had a big 4th of July celebration while we were on board.
But maybe the ship's biggest notoriety was a fire at sea it experienced in 2006, a result of a passenger's cigarette left burning in an ashtray on a balcony, which managed to cause at least smoke damage to about 150 cabins and the cancellation of the rest of the cruising season for the ship. The fire resulted in major changes to international requirements for fire protection on cruise ships (e.g., balconies now must have fire sprinklers -- previously, they were not required.)
Our first port of call was Stockholm, Sweden, where we saw the City Hall (of Nobel Prize fame) and a 1000-year old Viking ship.
Next we sailed on to Helsinki, Finland, maybe the least interesting of all our ports of call. An interesting tidbit of Finish life; residents apparently love to bring their floor rugs down to the shore to wash -- the government even provides little platforms to make this easy.
St. Petersburg, Russia, was our next stop. Known as Russia's "Gateway to the West," St. Petersburg was the capital of Russia for over 200 years during the period of the Tsars, and has also been known as Leningrad and Petrograd. Among large cities (over a million population) of the world, it is the farthest north. It is perhaps best known for the Hermitage ("the Winter Palace"), now the world's largest art museum. We also saw the Summer Palace, and Peter Hof, a delightful "beach house" with amazing fountains and gardens.
Estonia is one of the former Soviet republics along the Baltic Sea, and arguably the most economically successful of the old Eastern Bloc countries. Its centerpiece is its capital, the city of Tallin, with an intact medieval walking town. This is the only stop where Sandy actually did any shopping. (And we stopped for a local beer.)
Our next stop was in Poland, another former Soviet satellite. We visited the city of Gdansk (called Danzig by the Germans), and traveled out into nearby country side to visit a castle / fortress built in the 1400's by the Teutonic Order of Knights.
Next was our second day at sea, as we headed west and north towards Oslo, Norway. Oslo also has a City Hall that figures prominently in the Nobel Prizes. It hosted the Olympics in 1952, and is presently building an even bigger ski jump. It's also home to a huge city park, filled with hundreds of stone and bronze statues created by a single Norwegian sculptor in the early 1900's.
Our cruise ended up back in Copenhagen, and Mike and Sandy flew down to London where they spent the afternoon and evening with some friends who were neighbors back when they lived in London in the mid '80's. Dinner was out in the countryside in a former Royal hunting lodge built in 1550 (now a luxury hotel), and was delicious!
