My Baltic port guide part 1

I have recently returned from a cruise sailing around the Baltic which called into Skagen, Stockholm, Tallinn, St Petersburg (overnight stay), Helsinki, Copenhagen, Oslo and finally Zeebrugge for Bruges. For those of you who read my blog you know I am not one for sitting on a coach and being herded around sheep in a group for shore excurisions (had to do one in St Petersburg for visa regulations and which was fantastic and can be read about here:  http://www.cruise.co.uk/cruise-blogs/kerryscruiseguide/2015/07/13/my-whirlwind-two-day-tour-of-st-petersburg/, and am happier with a map and my feet to guide me round the ports so here is my guide to the ports of call.

Skagen – this was a maiden port of call for Azura on the north tip of Denmark,  and here they did lay on complimentary shuttle buses, we chose to walk from the ship to the small town and this took us about 15 minutes. There isn’t much in Skagen and it appeared many of the shops opened early for the ship. The one thing that you will notice and is extremely hard to avoid, is the smell of fish.  This is obviously a major fishing port and the shuttle buses stop outside one of the fish factories in Skagen.

Stockholm: P&O were running a shuttle bus here at a cost of £5 per person, however we decided to walk, so we got a map rom the tourist information ladies who were standing outside and also took the Hop on Hop off bus leaflet so we could follow their route. From where we docked it took us about 20 minutes to walk to the  Skeppsbron (the city’s old town – we decided to sightsee rather than shop) so we continued onto the Royal Palace where we had a look around the free parts (unfortuantly the P&O and Princess tour groups had just turned up so decided to avoid them otherwise we would have paid to go in) and then continued to walk to the Royal Opera House and a walk through the Kungstradgarden. Afterwards we walked past the National Museum before deciding that whilst in Stockholm we would go to the ABBA Museum so we started to walk but soon realised this may take some time so decided to get on the hop on hop boat which cost us 20 euros each. The boat stopped at the Vasa Museum, Skeppsholmen – where you will find the museum of Modern art, before arriving in at the island where Tivioli Land is (theme park) and also the Abba Museum

We arrived at the museum and saw there was one of those pictures where you put your head through so we decided to do the tourist thing and do that, the queue to get in was quite slow and unfortunately they only took cards and worked out at about £25 per person to get in and as we only had cash on us meant we were unable to go in, so we went back to the meeting point for the hop on hop off boat and it then dropped us right in front of where Azura was berthed.

Stockholm was a great city with still so much left to see for another time. Next blog I will tell you about our adventures in Tallinn and Helsinki

Kerry

xx