Saturday. We are officially onour way! We arrived at the
Once on the plane we had a little incident: I lost my iPod. We were the only ones on the plane. I had it out one minute and it was gone the next. We looked everywhere. I searched my bag. Adrienne searched my bag. I searched the floor, the seat, the overhead bin. It was nowhere. When people started to file in I really started to panic. Luckily the woman that said next to me noticed it under her chair. It was in a dark blue case on a dark blue carpet and I totally missed it. Whew!
The rest of the flight was uncomfortable but bearable. I loved the personal video screens. We each watched a different movie and I loved the flight show, which showed exactly where our plane was at every moment.
Gatwick was large but manageable with mom’s wheelchair and we got through our passport
check and customs easily. The bus to Dover was long and cramped but getting on the ship was super-easy. As soon as we walked in the door of the Cruiseline
terminal a porter took over pushing mom and shepherded us through the rest of the system and right to our room.
Adrienne and I have taken turns pushing mom around and so far we have not dumped her into any streets so that has been successful too.And now we are sailing! Watching the white cliffs slowly disappear was beautiful. We just finished an excellent first dinner and we still have a little time before the first show. We are all unpacked and just ready to relax and enjoy the rest of the trip.
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Sunday, 4:30pm. We have spent a lazy, lazy day today at sea. We woke up late and we wandered upstairs just as they were switching over from breakfast to lunch. We decided to wait for the lunch at the grill by the pool and while we were sitting there I noticed the hot tub. Mmmmm, hot tub. So Adrienne and I went back to the room, changed into our bathing suits, and jumped in. Nice!! It was probably in the mid 60s and overcast, but the sun started to come out and it was beautiful. We had a nice lunch and then sat and read our books while looking over the water. Well, some of us fell asleep but who is counting.
We went to the Broadway Name That Tune trivia contest and even teaming up with some fellow Holliday Parker’s and a complete stranger fromI don’t plan to use more minutes to load this until tonight so I will try to add a picture from our first formal night. Tomorrow is our first port. Hello,
10:15pm We had a wonderful dinner and watched a great show and then we just watched an amazing sunset. Yes, you heard me right, we JUST watched the sunset. Actually we just watched a piece of it before we were forced back inside by the wind, it still had a way to go. We have a bus tour of
We clean up OK.
Monday, 
1pm 
We just finished our second tour of
Just a quick stop back on the boat and then we left for our official bus tour of the city. It is a beautiful city with lots of parks and fountains and sculptures. The Vigeland Sculpture Garden really beautiful, there were hundreds of sculptures of ordinary family scenes, well ordinary except that everyone is naked. You can see a video about the park here and some still pictures here.
While I have been typing Adrienne just returned from her run back to the Hard Rock. We are heading up to lunch and the ship will be leaving in about a half hour.
*The shipcam is a camera looking right off the front of the ship. There is a TV station playing this camera all day and all night. We ended up using this as our nightlight in the room since there was no flicker.
Tuesday, 4:30pm – At sea
Life is good. We have been very busy since I last wrote. We played and won another trivia game, ate lots of food and sang Karaoke all night long. The picture is of me and Lynn after we sang a duet of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Today has been an “at sea” day and Mom and Adrienne are napping after a hard day of hot tubbing, reading, and playing games.
I know we have only been her a few days but having the three of us in a room is working out fine. Adrienne chose the pull out because of the mattress and we have just enough room to squeeze around her to get to the bathroom. The closet is big enough for all of our stuff and the wheelchair at night so we don’t have stuff all over the room. We take turns getting ready to go in the morning and before dinner so it all works out.
We lose another hour tonight and then we land in
Eating
The food is, as you would expect, excellent. This is a
picture of one of our appetizers from the other night and it was just as yummy as it was pretty. Besides the three of
us we have Sally and her friend Chuck and Pat and her daughter Beth at our table. We usually do different things throughout the day so we have plenty to talk about through dinner. I don’t understand why the cruise lines don’t train
every service industry in the world. As we get close to the dining room someone comes to help wheel mom’s chair right to the table. After the second night, three diet cokes (Beth has one too) and mom’s milk hit table just as we are sitting down and they don’t stay empty long.
bacon. It is a great system. Lunch has been on the pool deck at the grill, we can catch some sun while still having the sides covered so the wind is not too bad.
We had a great time in Stockholm. We knew there was a Hard Rock Café but since we had a tour scheduled for the afternoon we were not
sure when we would make it there. Adrienne and I decided to walk into town in the morning to find it. The cruise director told us that it would be about a 15 minute walk into 
We went over another bridge (did you know that
kind of like
could not find a taxi. They were all full. So we walked about a half mile before we finally flagged a taxi down. I asked if he spoke English and his answer was “so so” then I asked if he took credit cards and his answer was an enthusiastic yes, so we got in. Within minutes we were back at the boat.
We had just enough time to eat some lunch before we left again. This time, taking mommy, we boarded a smaller tour boat for a waterway tour. It was beautiful. We just sat back and our tour took us to old town, where we were able to get a picture of the hotel where we asked directions (Hotell Reisen). Our guide was cute and told us lots of nice stories and such. We saw lots of sun bathers laying on rocks
and swimming in the Baltic. I can’t imagine that the water was anything but freezing, but they must like it. We also went through some locks to go from the Baltic to another bay.
Getting into and leaving the city was really spectacular. Starting at about 5:30am we entered the archipelago that leads to the city of Stockholm so there was land on all sides. We saw a little bit of it on our TV in the morning but looking directly at the front of the boat did not do it justice. Then we took the same way back out and we were able to watch all of the islands and houses and such for a few hours after dinner. It was really cool.
Thursday, 
Helsinski, Finland
We did not have a tour planned for Helsinski so we decided to just take a shuttle into the city and look around. It was raining when we got up so we were a little worried, but as soon as we got off the shuttle the sun came out and it was beautiful again. We wheeled Mom through the park and then parked her at the edge of the market place. She people watched while Adrienne and I walked through the market and found some really good deals. We got t-shirts for the kids, bells, shot glasses, ornaments, and something for
Adrienne’s spoiled rotten little princess of a Granddaughter.
Yes, the child is wearing a CROWN.
We got back on the boat and had the place to ourselves to go in the hot tub and eat lunch. We are currently playing a geography quiz, but I think we are getting our butts kicked.
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Friday, St. Petersburg,
Day 1
Even when we suck we are better than everyone else. We got 8 wrong on the geography quiz and we took home another three free pens.
Anyway, today we landed in St. Petersburg. There was a crush of people getting off for their excursions first thing in the morning, but since our tour was not until the afternoon we stayed in bed a little longer and by the time we went up to breakfast we had the place to ourselves. There were 6 waiters falling all over themselves to do something for us. We wasted a little more time playing dominoes, we had lunch and then we disembarked almost a half hour early because we were just a little excited. Luckily, they were ready for us and we were able to set out on our tour right away.
We splurged on this tour and hired a private car with a driver and a guide. We were a little worried that they might show up in a mini cooper, which would have been a disaster, but the car was a very nice Mercedes Benz and we fit fine in the backseat and the wheelchair went right into the trunk with no problems. Our tour guide, Katerina (Kate), spoke great English and was very energetic and knowledgeable. We did a quick tour of the city seeing many churches, etc. before stopping at what we thought would be a souvenir shop. The first thing they did when we came in was to offer us a drink; what this usually means to me is that we can’t afford anything in the store, and, in fact, we couldn’t. The dolls and the eggs were absolutely beautiful but the price range was in the hundreds and thousands of dollars. They had the wrong tourists. We thanked them kindly and then explained what we needed to our guide.
After the store we toured a little more and then we went to the Hermitage. Kate came in with us and we decided that this is the way to see a museum. Mom’s
chair rolled easily between all of the different rooms and even buildings and Kate kept us informed about the most important pieces that we were seeing. All of the other tours had 30 or 40 people in them and we never would have been able to keep up, but with our private guide we had no trouble at all. The inlaid woodworking on the floors was really amazing and the golden sitting room was breathtaking.
After the Hermitage, we toured a little more and did another shopping stop. This one was more our speed and we spent many more of our tourist dollars. Russia is the only country where we are not allowed to leave the ship unless we have a tour so tomorrow, we have a “canals and rivers” tour in the morning and then we will be back on the ship in the afternoon.
Saturday, St. Petersburg – Day 2
We left a little earlier today for our boat tour so we ordered room service to be delivered at 6:30am. They called at 6:30 to make sure we didn’t want coffee or tea, they just couldn’t believe that someone would order breakfast and not coffee or tea. Our tour started on a bus where they covered a lot of the things that Kate covered yesterday in our car tour.
While on the bus our new guide, Tamara, outfitted us with these cool headphones and radio transmitters. That way she could talk in a normal voice and all of us could hear her without straining . It worked well except that she kept taking phone calls and yelling at someone in Russian while we all listened. We
decided that she was telling a child to leave his little sister alone. Once we were all settled with our headsets we climbed onto a boat to start the “waterways” part of the tour. We were on the Moika River, the Fountain River, and the Neve River. And the guide talked a lot but we were hardly listening. Every other building was a palace and I was not going to remember who lived there anyway. The big entertainment of the ride was a kid, probably around 10 years old, who followed us throughout the city. 
Every time we left one bridge he ran alongside and met us at the next bridge. It was quite a long run and he made it to every one, waving and doing cartwheels to make us clap. At the end of our boat ride he was waiting outside of the terminal and nearly everyone on the boat gave him a little tip. He had a few friends there that had been doing the same thing with the boats behind us, not a bad way to make a little bit of money. [This is actually a picture of someone else's kid that I pulled from their camera. Our kid was cuter.]
After the boat we went to the fortress and cathedral of Peter and Paul. This was not a venue for a wheelchair, there were lots of cobblestones and even when there was some even ground they kept throwing obstacles in our path for contstruction. We ended up leaving mom near the edge of
the courtyard and Adrienne and I headed in. 
Then we headed right back out, if I never see the inside of another cathedral that would be OK with me. So we just waited until the guide came back and then we got back on the bus. Adrienne got a few more souvenirs and we were very happy with this trip. The only "Russian" looking building we saw was the
Church of the Spilled Blood. I am adding a picture here because you will see it later in this post done in bread.
The dock we are at is definitely the ugliest of the ones we have seen, and the city is not nearly as clean or simple as the other cities we have been to on this trip but the heart of the city is really beautiful.
We were back on the boat in plenty of time for lunch and now we are playing Scattagories and kicking some more butt. We were hoping that we might have a day off but we will be in Estonia tomorrow.
White Nights
The nights here are very interesting. Instead of calling June 21st the longest day of the year they called it the shortest night of the year. I don’t see that there was any night at all. We were up playing karaoke so I stepped out at midnight and took a picture of the sunset. It barely goes below the horizon before it rises back up again. In St. Petersburg they were preparing for a festival to celebrate the students graduating from high school. We noticed they were setting up fireworks on the river, and we are wondering how they work. At home we wait until it
is dark than we set them off, what do they do here? There is no dark. Adrienne says that we will be getting some fireworks in Copenhagen so we will report back on how they look in the white night.
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Sunday, Tallin, Estonia
What a beautiful city. We woke up already docked this morning and we had a leisurely breakfast, won some more games and then headed off the ship to our bus tour of the city. Peter the Great had a big influence here while it was under Russian rule and since he built the best palaces that is what we went to see. Mom stayed on the bus for one of the stops but for the others we were able to wheel her to the sites and we all had a good time.
We have all showered and are killing some time winning some more prizes before another formal night tonight. We are at sea tomorrow and we are looking forward to just relaxing. I have not picked up my book at all yet, but I think I might end up napping.
Some guy who let me sit in his lap in the park.
Our ship was a little bit bigger than the other ships we saw. I think the little
guy on the left got a complex.
Monday, Sea Day
We are busier on sea days than we are when we are in a port. First there was lots of trivia to take care of; we lost most of them but we came within one on the Name That Tune, Movie Theme game. A few nights ago we had a concert pianist, Brooks Aehron,as our evening entertainment and he gave another concert yesterday that mom attended. Since I was napping when Adrienne went to pick mom up they decided to play bingo and Adrienne won $100. Woo hoo! We also relaxed in the Thalassotherapy Pool (I cut and pasted that word from the website). This is a glorious indoor well-heated pool. The bars you see behind Adrienne's head are rollers and they go down to form a chair with bubbles going all around you. I think Adrienne fell asleep.
After our show tonight we headed to the Bar at the Edge of the Earth for the “Not So Newlywed Game” where a pair from Holliday Park married 17 years) did not win but provided us with much laughter. When asked what Betty would say is his worst habit, Jerry said “It used to be smoking, but now I don’t have any.” Everyone laughed, but that is exactly the answer that Betty gave. While this show was going on the waiters were busy setting up the chocolate buffet. I was busy drooling over the chocolate buffet. Once it opened the crush was a little overwhelming, so I grabbed a chocolate mousse and ran. It was incredibly yummy. 
It was a dark chocolate top and then a light chocolate mousse underneath. I only ate that one and the top off of Adrienne’s and I still had a tummy ache at night. While the crowd was still on a chocolate high they started PatryGras. You can see a picture on mommy in her goofy hat on the flickr site below, I got extras for the boys. The other interesting part of this evening is that it got dark. Really, really dark. Just a few degrees make a huge difference. We noticed that it was dark outside around midnight at the party and I went out to check it out and it felt very strange. How quickly we get used to a new thing.
This morning we have docked at Warnemunde, Germany. We have the boat pretty much to ourselves since many, many people have taken the train to Berlin for the day. We are getting ready to disembark and we may take a train to Rostock if the timing is right.
Tuesday, Warnemunde/Rostock, Germany
We are practically intrepid. It was rainy this morning and we were a little worried about our touring plans but we set out anyway, just after my previous post, around 8:30am. The town of Warnemunde was a quick walk but the train ticket machine, which took credit cards, proved beyond our German speaking abilities. Adrienne tried to buy tickets at a ticket counter but they would not take credit cards or American dollars. So we waited for the bank to open at 9am and bought some Euro. We assumed the price of the ticket to Rostock was going to be 4Euro each way so we bought enough for that price. It turns out that the price was 4 Euro for a round trip ticket, luckily we found many uses for our left over Euros.
It was an easy train ride over to Rostock and once there Adrienne seemed to know where she was going, so we followed. This was probably the easiest city to push mom’s wheelchair in, there was a little bit of cobblestone, but mostly it was flat with paved or brick walkways. We walked a long way through residential neighborhoods and I was beginning to doubt that Adrienne knew what she was doing, but I should have know better because soon we were at a large outdoor mall/park/shopping area. There were no cars so it was really easy to get us and mom around. We walked through the whole mall area and I was getting pretty tired, we ended up sitting and having a drink and
some French fries at Burger King, not bad for a city that used to be part of East Germany.
The picture of the gelato was taken in a Galleria mall off of the main mall. Adrienne found a record store and was busy listening to some CDs while mom and I waited outside watching this gelato store. The mounds of gelato were amazing; I have no idea what flavor that red one is supposed to be. The line for this place never stopped once in more than a half hour. They just
kept scooping and people kept coming, if we had had any Euros left over I would have tried the one marked “nougat;” how bad could the inside of a milky way taste in gelato?
Just as we were contemplating our walk back to the train station we ran into some British trivia buddies and while chatting they asked if we had taken the tram from the train station. Tram? Why, yes, there is a tram right at the end of the square that goes right to the train. Yay! We ran into some others from Holliday Park after that and they were also happy to hear about the tram service. We hopped on and we were back on the ship in no time.
This is just some random drunken revelers.
We have had incredible luck with weather. Most days have been sunny all day, but even days that have started out as rainy or cloudy have cleared up for us as soon as we stepped off of the ship. Today was no different, we carried our umbrellas through the whole town but did not need them once. But as soon as we got back to Warnemunde the rain started to come down. Mom and I left Adrienne to do more shopping and we headed back onto the ship. We have become such a regular site, the porters were very surprised to see just two of us and not three.
Right now it is 8pm and again our trio has split up. I am exhausted, but mom and Adrienne plan to stay up for a late show tonight at 10:45. Tomorrow we will be docking in Copenhagen. We have a tour to Tivoli Gardens in the late afternoon and evening. It is supposed to be spectacular in the evening with over 100,000 lights.
I understand there have been some problems with the pictures. I will try to load them again as soon as I post. If I forget to compress even one picture, none of them will load.
Wednesday, Copenhagen, Denmark
Wednesday 4:45pm Well, our luck with weather is officially over. At around 11am everyone crowded into the Bar at the Edge of the Earth to watch us dock at Copenhagen, and the rain was pouring down. We went and had some lunch and then Adrienne and I decided to walk into town to look around before our tour tonight. Big mistake. It was just drizzling when we went out and started walking, I used my umbrella, but Adrienne decided it wasn’t worth it. By the time we hit the town it was pouring and she finally opened hers up. We were both drenched. We looked around a little bit and it is a beautiful city. I would have been nice to see in the sunshine, but as it was we were
pretty anxious to get back to the ship. So we found the Celebrity shuttle and got on.
When we got back in the room and peeled off our wet clothes we had the Celebrity TV station on and they were running a ticker saying that due to the wind, etc. we may not set out for Helsingborg in the morning. We are supposed to leave here at 6am and arrive there at 9am, but we are also suppose to tender into the port from our docking position, and it the winds are too high to do that we will just stay here in Copenhagen until 4pm tomorrow and then set sail for Dover. We just finished up a spelling bee which mom came close to winning, but she missed it by one. We did have to challenge the answers when the cruise person spelling “psychological” “pys.” I can’t even type her spelling in here since my computer automatically corrects such silly errors. Anyway, we plan to relax a little bit (we need to run the hair dryer on
mom’s jacket that Adrienne drenched on our walk), have some dinner, and then decide whether or not to try the shuttle to Tivoli Gardens tonight. It might be OK for Adrienne and I but managing the wheelchair in the rain might be a bit difficult.
10:20pm – Did I mention intrepid? A little rain (or even a lot) doesn’t stop us. While at dinner we made the decision to go in to Trivoli Gardens no matter what and we decided that mom was coming with us. Just as we were leaving the dining room the sun came out and we thought we were golden; we were wrong. After we boarded the shuttle it started to rain. The shuttle let us out along the street outside of Tivoli and told us going right or left would get us in. We walked left and after quite a long way we got to an entrance. Adrienne studied the map and said that the Hard Rock was at the opposite corner so we took off in one direction determined to make a loop of it. The place was beautiful. Since it was gloomy because of the rain the lights were already on and looked amazing. We stopped to watch some dancers but the rain was getting worse and the Hard Rock was within site. 
We made it over to what we thought was the entrance but it only had a sign saying we had to exit the park and enter from the street. So we got our hands stamped and out we went into the streets of Copenhagen. With little to no trouble we found the right entrance. We thought about getting just a milk shake or something to rest a little, but there was a half hour wait so we went on our way, back into the park and around our circle. We completed our circle, which included some fun gravel paths (did you ever try to push a wheelchair over gravel) and called it a night. Our shuttle bus was waiting for us and we were back on the ship in no time at all, glad that we took the trouble to go.
There still has been no decision made about where we whether we will go to Helsingborg in the morning. The ticker on the TV now says that the decision will not be made until 6am, so we
will wake up surprised.
Thursday, Copenhagen, Still
Thursday, 12:30pm We woke up just a little after 6 and saw that our boat was still docked and went back to sleep. If the ship had been moving we would have begun thinking about getting up since we had a tour scheduled in Helsingborg. There would be no tour for us.
So, here we are in Copenhagen again and Adrienne was regretting running out to the souvenir shop after Tivoli in the pouring rain, but she got what she was looking for so it was not so bad. She had also seen some t-shirts that she thought mom and I might like so we headed back out before lunch and picked one up (mom didn’t want one). It was nice just to get out into the fresh air; the rain had stopped but the wind was still pretty strong. Mom sat in the Bar on the top deck and she was able to watch us out the window. [This is a picture of our friend Gerri sitting where mom was sitting. Except I think the picture was taken in Stockholm.] We will play some trivia and sit in a hot tub before getting dressed up for our last formal night at dinner. I will try to log in and post this sometime this afternoon; it is only 6:30am at home and I like to log in when Lyle is up and might be on-line. It is much cheaper to chat on-line than to
call.
BTW, my phone did ring while I was napping the other day. I didn’t recognize number so if you tried to call me send an email instead. [It turns out it was Jackson's dentist office calling to
confirm his appointment for the next day.]
Friday, 8:50am – At Sea
We have had very rough seas since we left Copenhagen yesterday around 4pm. If you walk along one side of the ship there is water on the windows, but on the other side it is dry. It is not rain, it is water from the sea being blown up by the wind. Not many people are venturing outside, but boy can you tell when they do, the wind whips through the room sending up a groan from everyone around.
Last night the waiters paraded around with the flaming baked Alaska. They even used one as a birthday cake for Beth a few days late. Later, at midnight, they did the grand buffet in the late evening. Adrienne took some pictures but none of us were interested in eating again that late. So we (OK I) sang some karaoke and called it a night.
Remember the church from Russia?
In any case I will likely be reachable on Sunday and back in the office on Monday. I plan to do a cleaned up version of all of these posts with links and pictures etc. and post it back on my blog (and maybe here too).
11:23am – Well I just came down to the cabin to pack and I turned on CNN only to hear that there was a car bomb found in central London. We are not sure what that will mean for us at Gatwick tomorrow, but hopefully it will just mean increased security and not major delays.
It is a little bit easier to pack up to come home since I don’t need to do anything neatly and I don’t have to make sure I have a change of clothes in my carry-on. I have clothes at home and a washing machine at moms. So I am shoving as much as I possibly can in my suitcase (I have already unzipped the expander) so my carry on will be fairly lightweight.
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Extended Entries
Our table: Adrienne (empty chair), Erika, Chuck, Sally, Beth, Pat, and Mom
Our waiter, Hernando, was such a cutey. He flirted with mom a lot and wanted to please her. But since it was against regulations to leave the cake out over night to get hard (just like she likes it) he had to just pushed her in the wheelchair whenever he could. He also entertained us with stupid waiter tricks, I think that is supposed to be a chicken in his hand.
He also worked in the cafeteria for breakfast and lunch which came in handy if we needed anything then. 
Larry was the maitre'd and he also tried to play chauffeur to mom whenever he could, but I think she preferred me to anyone else. Our busboy was cute and very good at his job, but I don't think I got any pictures of him except during the Baked Alaska scene above. I do remember that he was not allowed to go ashore in Russia. Apparently, there are certain countries that are completely banned and so the wait staff are not allowed ashore. He was from Bali in Indonesia. While we were on board it was also a national holiday in Bali and all of his compatriots went out and celebrated.
The entertainment was not terribly strong on this cruise (compared to other cruises I have been on). The biggest exception was the acappella quartet; they were fantastic. 
They were all cute as can be but the one shown at left is my new boyfriend. He had a bass voice that I absolutely loved. Unfortunately, one of the four got hurt in Russia and had to be taken off the ship for some minor surgery, they got back on but they were not able to sing again until the very last night of the cruise.
Anthony!
Anthony is the thirteen year-old great-grandson of Sarah from Holliday Park. We saw him at the airport in Detroit and we were not sure how much fun a 13 year old could have on a cruise like this. Well, look at the picture below and let me know if you think he had any fun.
He sang at karaoke, he performed at the teen talent show, he participated in everything he could participate in and he had the time of his life. It was such fun just seeing him on the ship with his ear-to-ear grin. The age of the women he was hanging around with went up (considerably) by the time we got to Gatwick but his enthusiasm was still there.
This is a large contingent of the Holliday Park group. What a great group!!
