Visit the photo set 2016: Jewels of the Baltic Cruise on Flickr.
With a change of jobs on the horizon for us, Robin and I agreed that there were many places we had yet to visit and it would be good to get a. So once again we looked at cruises for our summer vacation. Given that we had not yet visited Sweden, Finland and other Scandinavian countries, we focused the Baltic Sea. Once again, Holland America had several options and in the end we decided on the 14-day Jewels of the Baltic, which would take us all the way east to Saint Petersburg, Russia and back.
This particular cruise also gave us the opportunity to travel on the newest ship of the Holland America fleet, the ms Koningsdam. This video gives you an idea of the size of the ship.
Certainly one of the highlights of the ship was the dining; we had great food and wine throughout the cruise, and particularly in the speciality restaurants. We even had the Culinary Arts Centre all to ourselves on the last night of the cruise and had a great dinner with two chefs and two wait staff cooking and serving just the two of us.
Itinerary-wise, the highlights for us were Saint Petersburg, Stockholm and Gothenburg. We’ll have to go back to Helsinki sometime; the weather the day we were there was atrocious, but the little bit that we did see was impressive.
All in all, Robin and I were happy that we had the opportunity to sample a little bit of the area and have a better idea now of places we would return to in the future.
