Wednesday 2nd July - Brockenhurst A beautiful day again, set off for Portchester Castle which d*** had visited on a school excursion years ago. It is a wonderful place with a late Norman Keep on the corner of a Roman Fort. The audio guide was brilliant & from the top of the Keep we had a great view of Portsmouth Harbour. We decided to join English Heritage and hope to be able to use the card on many visits. From there we returned to Brockenhurst via Netley A...

Sunday 22nd June – Moscow We were picked up at 10am & driven to the airport where we checked our flight & queued to checkin only to find it was for the wrong flight. An hour later we did manage to check in & wandered around looking for a short book on Moscow in English but without any luck. We spent our last Roubles on 2 coffees & then went to wait for our plane to Copenhagen. The flight was uneventful & we then moved on to the next one...

Thursday 19th June - St Petersburg Had breakfast & went for a walk on the other side of the Nevsky Prospekt, the main street. We walked up towards the Neva River & found a lovely gourmet deli with mechanical, puppet like figures from the 19th century in the window. Unfortunately it was closed but it reminded us of Fortnum & Mason's in London. From there we moved on to Peter the Great’s Castle, which is undergoing repairs & then returned to ...

Monday 16th June Managed a very early breakfast before our ride to the bus station to catch the 9am bus to St Petersburg. The ride went well but we were at the border with Russia for about an hour whilst we had our visas checked & the bus inspected for contraband. The countryside was pretty flat again but we saw the Baltic & arrived early in St Petersburg at 2.30pm local time having lost an hour to the new time zone. A young guy picked us up & drove ...

Saturday 14th June Met Wayne, Jane's travelling companion from Adelaide, as we waited for the bus to Talinn. The ride was similar to our previous ones in the Baltic except that we were much closer to the sea itself & passed a couple of small ports on the way. Talinn, the capital of Estonia is the most northerly of the 3 states & the people here speak a language related to Finnish which is completely unrelated to that of the Latvians & Lithuanians &am...