This will be our last planning update before we leave about a week from today. We have put the final touches on most of our planning efforts, and have also made a few changes since the last update. The biggest change is that we decided to switch hotels from staying in Warnemunde, Germany to staying in Rostock, Germany for the two nights before we leave on our cruise. There were several reasons we made this change, but the main reason was that all of the travel that we do while we’re in Germany before the cruise starts has to route through the main train station of Rostock, which is about a 25-minute train ride from Warnemunde. In addition it was easier to get from the town of Rostock to the cruise port via public transportation then it would have been from Warnemunde, even though it is a little closer to the port.
We looked at several hotels and finally decided on one that was fairly close to the center of town in an area called Neuer Markt. The name of our new hotel is Steigenberger Hotel Sonne. Click on the hotel name to visit their website and see the hotel
It was a little bit more expensive than our other hotel and Warnemunde, The Dock Inn, but it is also a little nicer and in a nice area of town close to restaurants and shops. The biggest advantage was that our first hotel did not have a room safe and we were concerned about some of our valuables, especially the amount of cash we have to take with us to pay for our tour in St Petersburg Russia. We actually made reservations at a couple of different hotels before we found this one and decided on it. The only minor issue with his hotel was that we had to pay in advance, but that is the reason why we have travel insurance to use in case there was some need to cancel the trip.
Changing the hotel to Rostock caused us to have to do a little bit of re-planning for some of the train schedules for our excursions that we’re going to do while we’re in Rostock, specifically on Thursday when we’re going to the Schwerin Castle.
Our new hotel is located right near a tram stop so it will be easy for us to get from the main train station in Rostock to the hotel on the day we arrive.
We are also trying to juggle our time in Rostock especially on Friday morning when we board the cruise ship. After checking out, we may end up leaving our luggage at the hotel in their secured locker while we go out and do some excursions on Friday morning before we head to the ship. The ship does not leave until 9:00 P.M. so we have a lot of time to do a little bit more sightseeing before getting on the ship.
One of the things that we are wanting to do is the Mollie Steam Train, which is in a town called Bad Doberan, about a 30-minute train trip from Rostock. We may try to do the Mollie train on the same day as we go to the Schwerin Castle. Our second thought was to try to do that on Friday before we got on the cruise ship but we are struggling a little bit with the schedule knowing that there will be four ships in Port that day, ours the Regal Princess, and three others that will actually be docked in Warnemunde. That is a lot of ships for such a small town and one of the more popular things to do for ship’s excursions is the Mollie train. If we do that on Friday we will need to get up early and try to beat some of the tour buses that come from the ships.
We are still planning to visit Warnemunde on the day we arrive after we check into our hotel in Rostock, since that will be our only opportunity unless we visit there on Friday morning when all the cruise ships are there, but it will likely be very crowded.
I’ve already purchased DART train ticket from the Berlin main train station to Rostock on the day we arrived at the Tegel airport in Berlin. It’s a little over 3 hours to Rostock from Berlin on the train. We chose a 10:20 A.M. departure time for the train which should give us plenty of time to get to the station from the airport which is about a 20-minute bus ride. Luckily the buses leave about every five minutes so we don’t really have to schedule anything specifically for that bus ride. Our flight is due to arrive at 7:50 A.M. at the Tegel Airport, and then, we will have to go through immigration once we arrive and claim our baggage. I have checked on actual arrival times for the last several days of our same scheduled flight to Berlin, and most of them seem to actually arrive a little bit early. Occasionally, one does arrive late and so we did not want to put undue stress on ourselves to try to make it to the train station for an earlier train if we end up being late arriving in Berlin. At most we might have saved an hour but that is not worth the potential stress of having to make the quicker connection.
We will begin our packing efforts this coming up weekend. We are trying to limit our luggage weight to 45 lbs. each so that we have 5 lbs. to spare on the 50 pound weight limit for the airlines. We are struggling a little bit with how much warm weather versus cold weather clothes to take so we will be checking some of the long-term forecast as the week goes on to get a better idea of the temperatures we might see. Of course, the trick is to take clothing that we can use in layers and stay away from taking too many heavy and bulky items. Rostock will probably be the warmest city we will visit as we head farther north and more east in the initial days of the cruise. We have looked up average highs and lows for the period of time from last year for the dates when will be at each one of our ports. In general, the highs are in the upper 50s to low 60s and the lows are in the upper 40s to low 50s. It is nice that we have access to free laundry on the Princess cruise ship and also the use of the laundromats. If we take that into consideration, knowing we will have to do some laundry, it will keep us from overpacking. Certainly we can’t pack for all 25 days.
We are also struggling a little bit with trying to determine how warm or cold it might be as we cross the Atlantic on the last several days of the cruise as we head towards New York. All of our other transatlantic cruises going from east to west have ended up in South Florida and it was much warmer as we headed farther south. We are taking a minimal amount of sunscreen because our feeling is that we will have some fairly cool days on the ship as we cross the Atlantic this far northward.
Well that’s about all for now. More than likely there will be no additional planning updates but we will try to provide some “live updates” on our travel day since we have a fairly long layover while connecting in the Newark Airport before we get on our flight to Berlin.