Still more planning…

After identifying and reviewing all of our options, we decided we’d like best… given our budget and schedule to take the cruise to St. Petersburg, Russia… that way we’d at least get a glimpse of a portion of what we’d looked forward to seeing in Russia… the next step was to lay it all out on a calendar so that we could then begin to consider the “excursion” options… one option of course was to forgo the cruise excursion packages and just “do it ourselves”… that’s OK for most of the European countries, but not Russia… it’s a little more challenging.

Please note, I absolutely LOVE Russia and everything Russian (especially my darling daughter-in-law and 3 gorgeous grandkids)… I’ve known of Russia my whole life, in fact some of my first books were biographies of Russian nobility. But no matter how much one loves Russia or Russian people, one can not just pack a bag and go to Russia… and Russians like it like that, and I don’t blame them.

One must either:
- have a Russian Visa OR
- be part of a shore excursion.

There’s one exception to the above. There are a couple of local tour operators such as Red October and Denrus with special certification that entitles them to carry passengers without a visa — though we’d have to register and show our ship a copy of our confirmed tour receipt before we could debark.

I contacted one of the above, and found that for slightly more than my entire excursion budget I would get a private car, private driver, and a separate private guide for two whole days. While I would love to do that, as I’m sure I’d get to spend more time in the places that interest me most, with less crowds, I still wanted to see a bit of the other countries on our itinerary too, so we decided not to do that, leaving us with the two options listed above.

When my grandson was here last summer he said, “Grandma, you have to learn Russian so that when you come to Russia to visit me you can talk to me.” I looked at him and said, “But you speak perfect English Darling.” He replied, “Not in Russia Grandma.”

He’s soooooo cute, I, of course adore him…. and I am learning Russian… but I’m not there yet…. and it’s an incredibly language oriented society… not every one there speaks English… so we decided to do the cruise provided excursions in St. Petersburg. Also, a Russian Visa costs roughly $300 per person for all the paperwork, it can cost more if you need everything immediately.

Back to planning… now that we decided where we were going and when, my next step in this process was to use a normal calendar layout with one month per page. It has the days of the week across the top and squares for each day with the numeric date in the corner of the square. I printed out one for August and one for September. I entered “to Europe” on the day we’d fly to Europe and then wrote where we’d be for each day. “Copenhagen”, “Set sail”, “at sea”, “Stockholm”, “Helsinki”, “St. Petersburg”, etc… This approach has several benefits… Primarily, it enabled me to see the big picture. While we want an exciting vacation, we don’t want to be needing a vacation from our vacation upon on our return. (I don’t think that’d go over well at work.)

The next thing I did was create a spread sheet that had the dates across the top, with hours going down the left… on this I then blocked out with color coded blocks where we’d be when. This let me see when I was flying versus when we’d be in Copenhagen, at sea, Helsinki, etc.. This let me have the whole time on one sheet of paper. Having the hours was very helpful, when I started laying out nail appointments, excursions, versus just laying around time.

I really wanted to start thinking about clothes. But, before I could truely lay out clothes, I had to know exactly what type of clothes I’d need and that is totally dependent upon activities…. consider that one does not really lay around the beach on the Baltic in September… well not this Southern belle anyway….. the weather during our time there is on the average 55-60 F….

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