Peter's Travel Blog

Whichever way you look at it, St. Petersburg was always going to be a hard act to follow. Helsinki is an interesting city, with lots of interesting features and locations, yet it all felt so very different to what we’d experienced over the two previous days. Tracey and I had been assigned to a City Tour, which basically means a...

This morning, we awoke to find ourselves still in St. Petersburg – which was a bit of a relief. If we’d drifted off in the middle of the night, that would just be embarrassing. Day two of the two-day package saw us heading back into the city; both Tracey and myself, and three other volunteers, each assigned to a coach...

Today, we arrived at the undisputed highlight of our voyage; St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg was its original founding name. It got renamed to Petragrad at some point along the way, and then for about 75 years, it was known as Leningrad, and was, at one time, the capital city of Russia. Russia is a different place, though, these days; the...

Today, we visited Tallinn, in Estonia. The rough seas and high winds had taken their toll, resulting in us not arriving until just gone midday, over two hours later than originally anticipated. The knock-on effect of that was that all the shore excursions had to be rescheduled, and our sail-away time amended to 6pm instead of 4pm, with a new...

As soon as we left Warnemunde and hit the open sea, the rocking and rolling started all over again. It was a wobbly old night that continued on into the next day; our second full day at sea. I ran the third of my classes, which was ‘Buildings Fast and Loose – St Petersburg’. The title more or less sums...