Our second stop was Lubeck Germany. This was in what would have been East Germany. We were on a tour from the ship. Our tour guide had lived in East Germany. Our route took us by what had been the border and she talked about it and the changes when the wall came down. At that place the wall was barbed wire fences separated by so many feet. It is all gone now and there is buildings and such there now. Lubeck is a very old town. It was founded around 1000 AD.When you walk along the street there are occasionally small openings. This is what we saw when we went thru one of the openings. This is where people live. It was very pretty.
We went in an old church that was interesting but they also have there little devil
The building were very old and interesting. Notice the round openings in the building.
This is where they make marzipan. We went to the place where they make the marzipan. I did buy some but I didn't know who liked it so I ate it myself. I really enjoyed it too. I still have some but I put it some place and can't find it.
This is Lubeck. A fun place to visit. We went to a stand to get werst for lunch. I think the guy didn't like me because I was American. He was very rude. I guess I should have spoken German but I didn't know how. I was giving him my money. I really tried to be nice.
Our next stop was Stockholm. It was really beautiful driving into Stockholm. They have all these islands our ship navigated thru. It much have been two hours going thru them. Some are large some small, some inhabited some not. It made for a very ride.
We went to the Vasa Museum. It houses the fully restored, wooden warship Vasa, the only remaining intact 17th century ship. It seems the king designed the ship and on its maiden voyage sank in the harbor. It was too top heavy. Because it was in brackish water it stayed intact. This is a replica. It was dark in the building and I couldn't get too good of pictures of the actual ship.
We visited Skansen and this is a view from there.
We took a hop on hop off boat to get around to the various sights This is a view from that boat.
Here we are on one of the streets we walked on. Stockholm was a fun place. I thought of Byron when were there and how much he would have enjoyed going back there after serving his mission there.
Our next stop was Helsinki, Finland. This is the view from our ship. We didn't have a lot of time here. We took the bus into town in the morning and walked around the town then went back to the ship to go on a ship shore excursion to Porvoo.
This is the Lutheran church in Helsinki. We liked Helsinki. It was clean and had stately architecture and the walk thru the city was along a park with the buildings on either side. It was really very pretty and well kept.
Porvoo was a fun little town. It is the second oldest town in Finland. I found it quite charming. It would be a fun place to visit just before Christmas. It says it goes out of its way to evoke an endlessly cheerful Finland of long ago. It was founded in 1346. It would have been fun to have had more time there to shop if I had had a way to get things home. I found a bread box I really liked and lovely linens. We did make a candy stop here.

Well this concludes this post and the next one will be St. Petersburg.

Unbelievable

I know I blogged about my lost luggage before and the horrible flight we had with US Airways but this past week I have had my faith in this airlines restored. I filed a claim for the expenses incurred because of the luggage delay including the $219 long distance phone bill. I planned to see what they would pay (I wasn't expecting anything) before I filed with our travel insurance where I knew I would get $200. I sent them copies of all the receipts instead of originals which is required and explained to them I had done this because I needed to keep the originals for my travel insurance if they didn't cover for my expenses. I could not believe it but US Airways came thru covering the whole amount $556.96. I may even fly with them again.