St. Petersburg Cruise – June 30, 2013
Planning
We had enjoyed our Barcelona Cruise two years before, so we decided to try it again with another cruise. Once again, we fired up the Vacationstogo website so we could explore all of the cruise possibilities. As I mentioned in the Barcelona blog, this site has a great interface that allows you to drill down into an area, and to find all the possible cruises to choose from. In this case, we ended up booking with the actual cruise company, Carnival, instead of Vacations to go since they had better prices and some specials that we could take advantage of.
As we started looking at the possible cruises, a few started to stand out for us. One possibility was the cruise that departed out of Venice. We also looked at some cruises that centered around Portugal. In the end, we found what we considered to be the perfect cruise. The cruise sailed out of Dover, traveled up through the Scandinavian countries and then spent two days in St. Petersburg, Russia. We could fly into London and spend a few days site seeing there, before taking the 1-2 hour train into Dover to board the ship. We had always wanted to visit the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg so this was our chance.
The itinerary looked great. We would stop in Copenhagen, Berlin and Helsinki before arriving in St. Petersburg where we would spend two full days. On the way home, we would stop in Tallinn, Estonia and Amsterdam. Due to the distance that we would need to travel, there would be several days at sea where we didn’t have a port stop. That was fine with us since it would give us a chance to relax onboard the ship. In total, the cruise would take 12 days to complete.
The Carnival Legend was a pretty standard ship with multiple swimming pools and jacuzzis on deck. They had a casino and a theater for entertainment, and of course a large dining room for their nightly dinners. As we did with our Barcelona cruise, we made sure to get a balcony room which gave us much more space and allowed us to see some amazing sunsets without going up on deck.
The deck of the Carnival Legend
Beautiful sunsets from our balcony.
Also, as we got further north, it remained light for much of the evening. Even at night, it was eerily light enough to see. These are called white nights, celebrated at the end of June in St. Petersburg, but also seen in other Scandinavian countries as well. From our balcony, we could witness the event first hand.
White nights, where you had light even in the middle of the night.
Another unique feature of our cruise was that it took us under the Great Belt Bridge. This is an 11 mile long suspension bridge linking the two sides of Denmark. It made for some nice photo ops, especially right at the moment that we went under the bridge, holding our breath. 🙂
Our cruise would begin in London, where we would spend three nights before heading to Dover to board our ship.
