Posts by Mike Mikus

 Leaving Finland, our excitement was mounting in anticipation of our visit to Stockholm.  We awoke several hours before our morning arriving,  allowing us to catch the morning light as the ship navigated its way through the narrow passageways created by the thousands of islands making up the archipelago off of the Swedish coast.  It was breathtaking,…

Today, we spent the day in Helsinki, the capital and largest city in Finland. Finland is a Northern European country of 5.5 million. Located on the Baltic Sea, Finland is known as one of the leading countries for building large, commercial cruise ships. And for its reindeer population, which is over 200,000. Also, believe it…

Riga, LatviaWedge between Lithuanian and Estonian, the Republic of Latvia is the third country which makes up the Baltics States. Latvia’s population is nearly 2 million, and the capital is Riga, which was our port of call on August 1st.  So, when cruising, it does not take long to become accustomed to waking up to a different…

Hello, and welcome back. Today, we are in the Kingdom of Belgium, located in Northwestern Europe. It has 11 million residents. The capital is Brussels, and French, Dutch, and German are spoken here.  While Belgium is likely best known for the chocolates, it is also where the saxophone and asphalt were invented. Also,  voting is compulsory…

Today, we crossed the English Channel, and docked in Southhampton, the port city for London to the east. Like our last port, it is several hours to the city from the port.  It turns out that, several years ago, a container ship lost a container at sea in the area. While containers  float, they tend to do…

CherbourgHaving visited southern France a number of weeks ago, we backtracked west through the Straight of Gibraltar, and headed towards Northern Europe. Luckily, we have a handful of additional stops in France along the way.  First stop, the town of Cherbourg along the Atlantic coast.  Cherbourg (pronounced “shehr · boo”) is also known by its full name…

This morning, we docked in Ireland in the town of Cobh which is pronounced “Cove”, by the locals. It turns out the “h” is known as a “lenited letter”, which is silent, but changes the  pronunciation of the following letter. So in this case, the “b” is pronounced as a “v”. Congratulations, you can now speak…

Vigo (July 19) After leaving Malaga, we travelled to north to Morocco and Portugal before our final stop, six days later, in Vigo Spain.  Vigo is fantastic. Completely walkable, lots to see and do, and many beautiful piazzas.  After a bit of site seeing, we stopped and had a snack. We actually found a nice…

Hello. Thank you for checking back in on our adventures. Got the next several days, we will be visiting Portugal, on the SW tip of Europe.  While Portugal is home to 10 million folks, it is a very small country. (Its neighbor, Spain, is nearly six times larger.) It is however the oldest country in…