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Our Travels
St. Petersburg to Moscow - 2011
In July 2011 Gail and I embarked on a 16-day river cruise through the heart of Russia aboard the river ship M/S Rossia, a river ship owned and operated by the Grand Circle Corporation. Our river trip started in St. Petersburg and ended in Moscow. While the sister ship M/S Tikhi Don started in Moscow and traveled to St Petersburg. It is not really a river trip it should be called a canal trip. The waterway is a series of canals that connect the Gulf of Finland (Baltic Sea) to the Volga River and canal to Moscow. The canal system was started by Peter the Great. The earliest was the Vyshny Volochyok canal completed in 1709. Additional canals include Tikhvin canal 1811, Mariinsk canal 1810 In the following decades additional canals were added. In the 1930s under Stalin the infamous White Sea – Baltic Canal was constructed by gulag prisoners at enormous human cost between Lake Onega and the White Sea.
Day 1 June 30: -Depart U.S.
At 6:30am I received a text message from Air France that our flight today to St Petersburg, which was to leave JFK at 5pm, was cancelled. I immediately called Air France but the recording said the office did not open until 9:00am. I called Delta which was code share and found that the airport workers at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris had gone on strike. With no airport workers all flights through Paris were canceled. The tour operator was no good telling us they could get us out in 3-days and lose three days of our river trip. Luckily we found a friendly Delta agent who was able to route us from JFK to Moscow and then a short flight to St Petersburg. Since time was short and our taxi to the airport was outside the Delta agent told us to go to the airport and he would make sure our flights were in order.
Day 2 July 1: -St. Petersburg, Russia
We finally arrived in St. Petersburg on. We were met at the airport by a Grand Circle representative and transferred us to the ship.
Day 3 July 2: -St. Petersburg City Tour
After breakfast we went on a city tour <City Tour 1> of St. Petersburg, St. Isaac’s Cathedral <St. Isaac’s Cathedral> is the largest church in the city, built originally to be the main church of the Russian Empire. The dome of the cathedral, which dominates the city’s skyline, is gilded with more than 200 pounds of gold, and the interior is elaborately decorated with exquisite mosaics, icons, malachite, and lapis lazuli. This grand church can seat 14,000 worshippers. Although the church was closed after the 1917 Revolution, it has reopened as a museum in 1931, and services for worshippers reintroduced in 1990.
On our city tour <City Tour 2> we saw the Admiralty, former shipyards, and the present Naval Academy on the banks of the Neva River. Palace Square—showcasing the beautifully baroque Winter Palace, General Staff Building, and Alexander Column; St. Petersburg University; and the Bronze Horseman, a striking monument to Peter the Great. We made a brief stop at the beautiful Church of the spilled Blood which is undergoing renovation. There was a couple getting married and taking photos at the church. It is the custom that the couple take photos at landmarks around the city.
A brief stop at the <Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood>, which was undergoing a major renovation, before a lunch stop. This important landmark was created as a memorial on the exact site where a terrorist named Grinevitsky, from the revolutionary organization People’s Will, mortally wounded Tsar Alexander II, despite his reforms, on March 1, 1881, by tossing a bomb at his feet. The church was modeled after St. Basil’s in Moscow’s Red Square. It took 24 years to build and 27 years to restore. It has an amazing 75,320 square feet of mosaics. <City Tour 3> Our next stop was lunch at a local restaurant. Have you ever heard of BROSCHT . It is a soup made from beets. My mother served it with sour cream and boiled potatoes.