We are counting down the days until our departure on Aug 20. We are travelling on our own, and David has been working for weeks to put the trip plan together. Our round-trip international flight takes us to Munich, where we will stay 2 days before flying to Moscow. But to organize the trip, he started with first booking the Russian Cruise, beginning in Moscow and ending in St. Petersburg. The cruise will meet us at the airport and take us to the ship. The cruise includes 3 days touring Moscow and 4 days in St. Petersburg.
We had to book and pay for the cruise to receive from the cruise company an "invitation" to visit Russia. We sent the invitation, printed off an email sent by the Russian Cruise company, along with a lengthy Russian visa application and our passports, passport photos, plus a processing fee, to a United States visa-obtaining agency. They got the visas--which are literally a page pasted in our passports--that approve the entry into Russia. Once we had that all set, David could begin building the rest of the trip.
Following the cruise, we plan to stay on in St. Petersburg for a couple of days on our own, especially to have more time at the Hermitage Art Museum. We will then fly to Warsaw and from there travel by train for three weeks to Krakow, Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and finally back to Munich in time for Oktoberfest and our return flight home. We will stay in each city 3 or 4 or 5 days before heading on.
I am creating this blog as a method of journaling about the trip. You can log on to read the blog at your convenience. Hopefully, access to internet will be better in Europe than it was last year in Kenya and Tanzenia. I will not be blogging every day before we leave, but hope to keep up on a daily basis once we are under way. Today is 23 days and counting. Wish us Bon Voyage!
