Liepaja, Latvia

This morning's docking location in Liepaja rivaled Gdansk in its attractiveness. 

The included excursion "Liepaja city highlights" was somewhat lacking in highlights. Despite being Latvia's third largest "city", Liepaja has only 60,000 inhabitants. So there wasn't that much to see. 

Highlight of the tour was an organ concert in St Trinity's Lutheran Cathedral.

Other than that we were treated to the local market and the beach.

Liepaja is sometimes known as the city of wind, and it was certainly very windy today. Rather than hang around in the town for "free time", we took the shuttle bus back to the ship and I washed my hair.  We won this afternoon's trivia quiz and this evening we had a nice meal at the hot rocks grill restaurant on the pool deck, where you cook your own meat.

Tomorrow we will be visiting Riga, Latvia's capital. The sea is a bit choppy this evening.

Gdansk

This morning we are docked in the port of Gdansk, on the Vistula river, and this was the lovely view from our veranda.

Fortunately, the old town, where we were taken for our excursion, was a lot more attractive.

Amongst the main attractions is the statue of Neptune. His "package" is strategically covered by a seahorse fin. Apparently, this was necessary because of the historical tradition that unmarried young women who touched him there would be married soon after. 

The Fahrenheit monument pays tribute to Daniel Fahrenheit,  the inventor of the Fahrenheit scale, who was born here in 1686.

St Mary's church, built in 1502, is the largest brick church in the world.

Buildings often have decorations on their roofs indicating the coat of arms of the family that lived there, or the purpose of the building for public buildings.  This particular building was an amunition warehouse and the metallic decor represents an explosion rather than a flower.

Back onboard in the afternoon, Denise swept the field at bingo. After a nice meal at the main restaurant we had a nightcap in the observation lounge. The clocks go forward an hour onto Latvian time overnight, so we didn't stay up too late.

Bornholm

Today we are docked at Ronne (population 14000), the largest town on the island of Bornholm (population 40000).  Although this island in the Baltic is part of Denmark, it is physically much closer to Sweden, and the population are fiercely independent.

We had a coach tour of the island, starting at the ruins of the fortress of Hammershus, which is the largest fortress in Scandinavia.  

After this we moved on to the quaint fishing village of Gudhjem.  Denmark is a very flat country and this one of very few towns that is built on a hill. 

There are 2 smaller islands just off the coast from Gudhjem and every morning at 10am the local choir sing as the ferry to these islands departs, in order to wish the ship a safe journey.

Our final stop of the tour was at Osterlars church. There are 7 round churches in Denmark, and 4 of them are on Bornholm.

Back onboard, Denise did unfairly well at the bingo, winning multiple times. We then teamed up with an Australian couple, Lynn and Rudi, to come 2nd in the trivia quiz.

We had an evening meal at the poolside grill, where we got to cook our own meat on hot rocks.  Then we went for our evening nightcap in the observation lounge as the ship sailed away from Bornholm and on towards tomorrow's stop at Gdansk, Poland. 

All Aboard Silver Dawn

Short entry for today as we're not doing much except boarding the ship.

We checked out of our hotel this morning after 2 lovely days in Copenhagen,  and took a taxi to the port to board our ship: Silver Dawn.  

After a quick cocktail and a buffet lunch we were allowed into our suite where a bottle of champagne was waiting. 

We sailed out of port just as we were finishing dinner, so Denise and I headed up to the observation lounge on the top deck for the best view.

We spent the rest of the evening up there having a few cocktails while we tailed another cruise ship out to sea, passing the Oresand bridge that connects Denmark to Sweden and also passing some huge wind farms.

Tivoli Gardens

We did a LOT of walking yesterday, so today was a more relaxing day.  The only sightseeing we did was to go to the Round Tower. The queue to go up was too long, so we didn't bother.

We spent most of the day leisurely strolling Tivoli Gardens, which is right next to our hotel.

We didn't go on any of the rides. Most of them went way too far up in the air for my liking.

There were plenty of other points of interest in the park.

We ended up on the terrace of this rather spectacular hotel in the gardens having a cocktail, before we left the park.

In the evening we went back to Nyhavn again for a very nice dinner at another seafood restaurant. 

Wonderful wonderful Copenhagen

A beautiful day today. We enjoyed walking around the city and we certainly got our exercise in.  

We started by strolling over to Nyhaven Harbour for breakfast by the waterside.  

After that, we walked along the waterfront for a couple of km to the statue of the Little Mermaid.  It's much more accessible than I expected. I thought it would be way out in the middle of the harbour, but it's actually very close to the shoreline.

We continued walking along the waterfront back towards the Christiansborg Palace. There seem to be fountains all over the place. I'll probably be thinking "not another xxxx fountain" by tomorrow.

At this point we decided to stop at the Admiral Hotel on the Harbourfront for a drink. The weather was glorious and the view was lovely.

Then we walked on to the Palace and went up the tower to see the views of the city from the top. There was a lift that went partway, but we still had to walk up a spiral staircase to get right to the top.

Back to our hotel for a quick break and then it was back to Nyhavn for a fish supper at the Fisken Pub.

Then we walked past Tivoli Gardens on the way to the Villa Copenhagen, which is one of the most expensive hotels in the city. We can't afford to stay there but we thought we'd pop in for a drink to see what it was like.

Arrived in Copenhagen

 After a long journey: overnight flight to Heathrow from Ottawa and a day in a hotel at Heathrow, i finally met up with Denise in terminal 5.  Out flight to Copenhagen was delayed due to a failure of the AC on the plane, but we eventually made it. It's still light at 9.30pm as we're a bit further North.

And here we are having a singapore sling in the bar at our hotel, to celebrate the fact that we finally made it.