We have put together general plans of what we want to do while in most of our ports of call for this trip. Several are fairly easy, and do not require us to go very far from the port, or, we are just staying in the port city. There are a few others that we will venture farther away from the actual port, so those always take more upfront planning so that we can maximize our sightseeing time.
In this post, we will list some of the easier ports of call and our general plans for those ports. They are not in any particular order, but several are at or near the beginning of the cruise.
Tallinn, Estonia
Tallinn is our first port of call after we depart Warnemunde, Germany. Luckily, we have a sea day between Warnemunde and Tallinn to get situated on the ship. We are in port from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
Tallinn is the capital and largest city of Estonia. It is situated on the northern coast of the country, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland in Harju County. Tallinn’s Old Town is one of the best preserved medieval cities in Europe and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Old Town is an easy walk from the port, so we will not need to utilize any transportation from the ship. We stop at Tallinn on a Sunday, and are planning to attend Mass at 10:00 AM at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral. Afterward, we will just visit several of the historic sights in the city. Hopefully, most of the shops and restaurants will be open, at least on Sunday afternoon.
Saint Petersburg, Russia
St. Petersburg is our second stop, and we arrive there on Monday, September 3, at 6:30 AM. We are there overnight and leave on Tuesday a 6:30 PM. As discussed previously, we are taking a two day tour with a company called Best Guides. We are seeing most of the popular sight in St. Petersburg, and this is our Itinerary of the “Best of the Best Tour” that they offer. We will not go into a lot of detail here other than to provide the link to the itinerary. We are not planning on doing any of the optional night tours listed on their itinerary.
We have heard from reading posts in Cruiser Critic that for some reason, there may be some trouble getting off of the ship early. Apparently, on somewhat of a random enforcement, the port authorities may not allow independent tour passengers off of the ship until all of the ship sponsored tour groups have departed. Since we are on an independent tour, we may get caught up in the delay. Some seem to think this is an agreement by the cruise lines to make it harder to tour on your own, but we know that many passengers do independent tours. We will just have to get up early and be ready to get off of the ship and go through Russian Immigration. I am sure that after two full days of touring here, we will be tired.
Helsinki, Finland
Helsinki is the next port of call after St. Petersburg. We arrive at 7:00 AM on Wednesday, September 5, and are in port until 4:00 PM. It is a short walk and tram ride into the city center of Helsinki, and our plan is to just tour the city for the day. We were reluctant to plan anything major right after our two long days in St. Petersburg. One of the sights there, the Temppeliaukio Church is a Lutheran church. The church was designed by architects and brothers Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen and opened in 1969. It is built directly into solid rock, it is also known as the Church of the Rock. It is one of main attractions in the city.
Another sight is the Suomenlinna Fortress, about a 20 minute boat ride from the city center. There is also a Cathedral and a Market, so we’ll just have to see how early of a start we get and how much energy we have for a relatively short port day.
Aarhus, Denmark
Aarhus is two port stops after Helsinki. We skipped over Stockholm and Copenhagen, since they require more detailed planning, and will be covered an a subsequent planning post. There is also one sea day between those ports of call, a brief period of relaxation.
We arrive in Aarhus on Sunday, September 9, and are in port from 7:00 AM until 5:00 PM. We will be docking at Pier 129, which is just a short 10 minute walk into downtown.
We are planning go to Mass at 10:00 AM in the Aarhus Cathedral so that we can also see the inside of the cathedral, which is normally closed to touring on Sundays. Our other option had been to go to a vigil Mass on Saturday, the previous day at the port stop in Copenhagen, but once we found out that the cathedral here is closed for Sunday tours, we opted to plan on going to mass here so we can also visit inside. The rest of the day, we will spend in the city. The only other attraction that is nearby is the home of Hans Christian Andersen, but that is farther away than we want to venture.
Kristiansand, Norway
We arrive in Kristiansand, Norway on Monday, September 10 at 7:00 AM, and are in port until 4:00 PM. The cruise terminal is only about a 0.3 km walk from the city center. There is a Cathedral, a Fish Market and Amusement Park that are some of the main attractions in the city, and a WWII Cannon Museum a short bus ride away from the city. The cannon is a large WWII German coastal gun battery, and is the second largest land cannon in the world at 337 tons. The cannon bore is 380 mm or about 15 inches. We are planning to try and visit the cannon after Mass.
Dublin, Ireland
The last port we will cover in this post is Dublin, Ireland. We arrive there on Thursday, September 13 at 5:00 AM, and depart at 3:45 PM. This is one of the port schedules that was drastically changed by Princess a few months ago, much to the disappointment of many of the passengers that have expressed their feelings through the Cruise Critic forums. Normally, this would not be a “simple” port, there are many things to see and do here, but with the limited schedule of usable hours that attractions may be open before we have to head back to the ship an hour before sailing time, we are not planning on doing much here but visiting one or two sights in the City. We have been here before, so although it is a disappointment that we are here so short of a time, at least we have already seen many of the historic sights.
We will either shuttle to downtown Dublin, or take a taxi, depending on what we really decide to do on an early morning in Dublin. Maybe during the cruise we will find out why this port visit was shortened from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM to our current schedule.
This is all for now, we will be adding information later on our time in Warnemunde before the cruise, as well as the remaining port stops in Stockholm, Sweden; Copenhagen, Denmark; Greenock, Scotland; Cobh, Ireland and Halifax, Nova Scotia.