Cruisin'

From Stockholm Aya and I boarded a Royal Caribbean cruise around the Baltic, making stops in Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Tallinn, and Riga then back to Stockholm. We went with old friends of ours, Bet and Brian. The cruise was set for a week, so most places we were only in port for a day. This is the first time that we went on a cruise and there were some clear pros and cons to this compared to other travel that we have done.
The huge positive is that accommodation and transportation get combined. You don't have to lug your bags around with you and you travel, mostly, as you sleep. It made a good use of time to get you from place to place and was easy. The second best thing was that once on the ship the amount of things to do and food to eat was good, lots of activities going on and always somewhere available to get food or drinks. However, there were a number of negative things too. These are mostly to do with travel style, not the cruise ship itself. Compared to the way we usually travel, it was a bit sterile. We didn't have to speak to locals much nor navigate our way around cities like we normally would. We also didn't have downtown in these places. Once we were off the ship it was go-go-go to see as much of the cities as we could before we had to be back on the ship, so its mostly just trying to get to the major attractions. No time for wandering down side lanes. Probably the thing that I liked the least was that when you visited a place it was likely that a couple thousand of the other people from the ship were also going to visit those same things at the same time. One day in Tallinn was especially bad. It had rained in the morning so most people stayed on the ship, not us. Also due to bad weather there were 4 other cruise ships in port that day, so when the weather broke around noon the streets of this small town were inundated with tourists.

Overall I am glad we did the cruise. We might do it again in the future, but maybe not unless we are older and it makes more sense to do it or if we are in a geographical region where it is easier to go by boat, like much of the Caribbean. The cities we did see were beautiful, although the weather was pretty bad most of the time that week. Stockholm's streets and waterways were beautiful. In Helsinki we went to Suomenlinna fortress, which was quite a cool historic site. The architecture in St. Petersburg was so unique, it might warrant a trip back there some day. Tallinn and Riga were both a bit smaller and I might say similar in that they had beautiful old towns with well preserved churches, doors, and homes.

When we arrived back in Stockholm I think we were all a bit glad to be off the ship, it was just too much go-go-go. For the next week or so we would slow it down a bit, going to Vilnius and Krakow.