Okay, I’m ready to be done with my last vacation, but it took me this long to pull together my favorite photos out of the 250-some we took and load them onto a Flicker slideshow. So for those of you who would still like to see more of the Russian fabulousness, the link is HERE. […]

I’m very late catching up on some old business that came my way before the trip. The one I really want to get to is a mistake I made back HERE when I was reviewing “The Boundless Garden” by Alexandros Papadiamandis (known as “The Greek Dostoyevsky.”) I said then that the book was out of […]

It’s a terrible thing to find that you’ve used up all the superlatives you can think of, just when you need them most.
Saint Petersburg was always the biggest attraction of this cruise for me. Judging from the fact that the cruise stops there for two full days, it obviously is for a lot of people. […]

When we last checked in with our heroine, she was whining that Copenhagen was too modern to suit her tastes. What a fine bit of irony, then, that the next stop in the cruise was Tallinn, Estonia. Not to say that a person can’t find Starbucks, McDonalds and such in the newer part of Tallinn. […]

Oh dear, I was afraid of that. We didn’t care much for Copenhagen.
Well, there’s nothing to say you have to make a love connection with everyplace you stop. And I don’t think it’s any reflection on Copenhagen. It’s breathtaking, bustling, full of life.
But the reason it wasn’t a hit with me is that it’s definitely […]

Since we had walked over some of the basic Edinburgh sites back HERE in ‘05, I was looking for something a bit “off the brochure,” and also wanting to indulge a current interest in the abbeys and monasteries in the U.K. that were shut down in the 1500’s. A Scottish commenter on a cruise chat […]