Walking tour of Helsinki

After breakfast, it was time for a guided walking tour of the city center area.  Thankfully the rain held off. I came prepared for the cobblestones and brought my running shoes....

It was a good thing, because there was a lot of this.....

First on the walk was the Lutheran Cathedral. Even though it is undergoing some renovation, it is still gorgeous...

We also learned a helpful hint, these stores are everywhere and have bottled water, cokes and snacks! Good to know....

We made it!

We made it to Helsinki!  Thankfully we got out before the Delta power outage shut things down for a few hours. We had some apparent infrequent fliers sitting behind us on the transatlantic flight.  Their concept of traveling with other people left a lot to be desired.  But we arrived safely in Amsterdam and then on to Helsinki.

We were warned about daylight hours here, so thankfully the hotel has heavy drapes - daylight is from 3 am to 11 pm!

This morning's breakfast was nice - starting with a shot of blueberry juice (?)  All I could find by Googling was that Finns are obsessed with berries (??)

It's cruise time again!

Did I happen to mention that we love river cruises?  Well we do - and we leave tomorrow for a first ever trip to Russia  for a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow!  We'll spend three days in Helsinki first..... should be amazing!

And my packing mess has not improved.....

The whole boat

I finally got a picture of the whole boat!

Castles of the Rhine

This morning's agenda was billed as a scenic cruise through the Middle Rhine to see vineyards and historical castles.  I thought this might mean two or three castles but not so!  It seemed we would just finish taking picture of one castle and another would already be there -- and on both sides of the river!  Some of the castles are in ruin, but a number of them have been restored and a few even have hotels in them now.

I'll share a few castle photos:

Below are two castles that originally belonged to two brothers -- after a feud, they built a wall between the two so they didn't have to see each other!  It seems that ancient German stories or fairy tales never end happily -- and this was no exception -- everyone dies.

Next stop - Heidelberg

Our stop on Friday morning was the beautiful town of Heidelberg!  What a cool place!  The town is not on the Rhine River, but our tour included a 45 minute bus ride there.  Heidelberg is actually on the Neckar River so there was a gorgeous historical bridge there - and I love bridge pictures!

This is one of the gates to the bridge:

And this is the view of the bridge from upstream:

While Heidelberg has a great pedestrian shopping/restaurant area, we spent most of our time touring the castle:

Starts with S

Forgot to mention, we had to do a mandatory Safety drill on our first full day!  We passed, and, in fact, our "muster time" was apparently excellent.

We also are experiencing some amazing Sunsets!!!  #peacefuleasyfeeling