My wife and I sailed aboard Holland America's Eurodam 'Gems of the Baltic" cruise on June 12th.  This was only our second cruise, so we by far, not experts on cruising but will give you our honest opinion of our experiences.It was unfortunate that the weather was horrible for half of our 10-day cruise.  We were unable to dock at our first port of call, Warnemunde Germany, due to 50+mph winds. Thus we were at sea for our first two days finally arriving at Tallin, Estonia on our third day. We were greeted by more rain, but little rain.  Tallin is a great little city and we enjoyed it even though it rained a majority of the time we were there.

 Our next port of call was St. Petersburg Russia where we were greeted by more rain.  We did a tour of Catherine's Palace & Pavlovsk (Paul's Palace) on our first day.  We had to stand outside of Catherine's Palace for nearly an hour before we gained entrance into the palace.  Since we were suddenly short of time, we were rushed through the palace. It was wall-to-wall people in the palace.  Fortunately, the rain let up for a few hours in the morning so we did see brief glimpaces of the sun and blue sky.  After a nice lunch, we visited Paul's Palace which was less crowded and less hurried.

 Our second day in St Petersburg we booked the "Journey Through St. Petersburg" tour.  It poured rain the entire time. Our tour bus was so fogged over that you were unable to see any of the sites very well.  We did have a great tour guide however. Read more