Our group left the ship early in order to go to the Presidential Palace in Estonia for a brief meeting with the President of Estonia, Toomas Ilves. President Ilves is a colleague of mine from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who returned to Estonia after independence, representing the country first as Ambassador to the US, Canada, [...]

We arrived on another holiday. June 12th is Russian Independence Day, the day in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin was elected the first President of the Russian Federation and the day which he declared Russian independence from the USSR. We visited the Hermitage and toured the beautiful city, lovingly restored to its previous splendor in only [...]

We sailed first to Helsinki overnight, arriving in the morning on another glorious day. In fact, we were told that there had been snow on the ground until two weeks ago and this was among the nicest days in June in recent memory. We arrived on the eve of the annual Helsinki birthday celebration and [...]

Le Boreal docked in the old city and we boarded on a hot sunny afternoon, and as we were leaving a naval vessel arrived to take our place alongside. The Swedish archipelaego is beautiful, and rarely seen on such a sunny afternoon. I tried to imagine the snow, low clouds and fog, but quickly let [...]

The first night that the sun never really goes down is always a bit of a shock. While the sun did get below the horizon and there was officially a sunset and sunrise every day of the trip, the truth is that it never got dark, only dim or dimmer. Stockholm was warm and sunny [...]