We loved this place. Instead of the ship's walking tour, we did our own (almost the same but included something that was just meaningful to us). So easy to walk into the little downtown. Plus they had volunteers around the port area, to answer questions.

Here we didn't manage our time as wisely. Still, a wonderful surprise of a port.

We visited Christianborg Palace, which we missed on our two days there in 2008. Loved it. Great city, then and now.

Cell phone map app works great when walking places. I highly recommend T-Mobile, for free data.

We took the ship's walking tour but left partway through. Learned some things from the guide, but had several other things we wanted to see. Worked great for us to return to the shuttle bus pickup on our own. Again the cell phone map app was invaluable. Gdansk's Old Town is so much fun! Very photogenic. Two special churches are worth a visit, we thought.

An island, requiring a tender. We lucked out, because the weather in the a.m. had been very rainy, but our afternoon walking tour enjoyed decent weather. We went in early (afternoon tour met after exiting the tender) and did some wandering around ahead of the tour. Photogenic place, also with two easily visited churches. We walked by the Maritime Museum but didn't go in. We might've visited it when we were by ourselves, if we'd known the order of our walking tour. Still, we really enjoyed our time at Karlskrona.

Another island we had never heard of. More beautiful photo ops. The included tour was a bus tour with three stops, one with great shopping, one a church with an old/new cemetery, one a beautiful vista. After the tour, one of us went back to the ship for an actual half hour of walking on the deck of the ship, while the other one of us walked to a little area with animals, mentioned by our guide but not accessed on our bus tour.