Baltic Cruise

Earlier this year we signed up for this cruise and have been looking forward to it for some time.

Trying to get all the excursions booked and the associated travel plans is a little bit of a chore but when done right it is very rewarding.







We got checked in at the cruise terminal. Our ship for this cruise is the Celebrity Constellation. It is a nice sized ship, it has about 2,000 guests on board.  This is our second cruise, the first one was a Eastern Mediterranean cruise. A cruise is a real people watching event, you are all captive on the ship and you see the same people at the various activities, dinners and on deck.







We left out of Amsterdam with stops in Warnemunde, Germany, Stockholm, Sweden, Helsinki, Finland, two days in St. Petersburg, Russia, Tallinn, Estonia and Copenhagen, Denmark before going back to Amsterdam. We spent two days before and one day after the cruise exploring Amsterdam.

I'm not sure why they have a statue of a gorilla holding a fish on the deck but here is a pic of it.

Wind turbines were everywhere, we would be cruising along the coast of a country 20 kilometers from shore a we would go by 15-30 wind turbines all spinning away in the city, a field, and even the middle of the North Sea.

 

According the Captain, the winds were too strong to safely enter the harbor at Stockholm so we turned South and anchored the ship and "tendered" to the port of Nynashamm. The seas were a little rough and it took a while to get the tendering operation started, our Stockholm excursion was shortened.




 

There was a series of lectures called "Beyond the Podium" where lecturers discussed topics related to history related to the ports of call.  There was a three part series about forensics, DNA and the Romanovs which was very interesting.







There was another about Carl Faberge and his family. One of the on-board shops is a Faberge dealer. They had several Faberge eggs on sale. Elizabeth enjoyed going into the shop to see them.


Along the way we went through some locks.  The ship was barely able to fit in the locks, there was only a few feet extra space in width and length.


We had a balcony room and spent some nice times there enjoying the sights. One was this really nice beach just north of Amsterdam. As you can see, there were many small cabins for changing, sleeping or whatever. The picture below shows people enjoying the water. By the way, those are not birds in the air, they are kites in the air with people at the bottom. This sport is called kite boarding.

There is a somewhat interesting bridge linking Denmark and Sweden called the Oresund Bridge.  The route from one country to the other is actually a combination of the bridge and a tunnel, a really modern and unusual way to join the two countries.  During our cruise we went "Under the Bridge" twice, once on our way to Warnemunde and again on our way back from Tallinn to Copenhagen.  There is only 30 feet clearance between the top of the ship and the bottom of the bridge, that seems like a lot but it is not that much.  Both times it was at night. We were on the top deck the second time, it was pretty neat.





One of many beautiful sunsets we enjoyed on the cruise.