June 26 Day 13 Cruise: At Sea

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So, between it being a day "at sea" which means we don't get off the ship, as well as moving the clocks forward an hour, breakfast was a very quiet place this morning.  We had a good breakfast, and then Dick headed back to the room to work on photos.  He took over 500 yesterday alone, and knows that sorting through them while we travel (getting rid of the blurry or poor ones, marking the best shots, and then cleaning up a handful from each day for the blog) this is a big job, but one that is especially satisfying for him.

While he did that, Patti attended a lecture learning all about amber:  tree resin from millions of years ago that hardened into gemlike stones.  It turns out the best amber in the world is from the Baltic region.  There was lots of learn, but the bottom line was:  if someone tries to sell you really cool amber with an insect in it that was cheap, it's fake.  It was an interesting lecture.  She also heard the same speaker talk about Russian lacquer boxes with a bit of a couple of fairytale thrown in for good measure. Again, boxes for cheap are made for tourists and are not the genuine artistic fine art pieces.  And pretty much, the real stuff is way out of our price range. He passed along one that was worth $20,000.  It was so lovely!  But $20,000!   

Also, during the day there were port previews of the next ports: Tallin Estonia, St. Petersburg Russia, Helsinki Finland, and Stockholm Sweden. Especially when you arrive with only a day, or even two in these amazing places, it makes sense to be prepared and to pick the brains of the tour-planning folks.  And the ones that we had onboard are great.  We had already done a bunch of research, but got some other great ideas. Generally, we are happy to make our own agenda and do independent travel around these areas.  However, on this cruise, we are signed up for several tours which we are hopeful will give us some really great extra experiences.

Several times a day information is placed in our mailbox just outside our cabin door.  It was always interesting to see what they added.  Each evening it was the schedule for the next day.  We were especially interested in seeing the "all aboard" time that was 30 minutes prior to the ship leaving the dock for the next port. We thought we might share here some scenes from around the ship.

For dinner, we used one of the reservations that we received from our travel agent at the premium restaurants, this one serving Italian food.  We got dressed up and enjoyed good food with lots of extra attentive service.  Nice, but not anything we need to do very often.  We have mostly been quite happy with the buffet dining, rather than the white table cloth fancier restaurant.  Tonight was one of the gala nights in the main dining room, and we saw suits, tuxes, and fancy dresses.  As Dick said, some of these people brought a lot more clothes and suitcases along than we did.

After we changed back into our jeans, we heard the Lincoln Center ensemble play classic movie themes including the one from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and the Cantina Theme from Start Wars. Then off to work on photos and head to bed.