Ah, the Baltic Sea. I’ll soon be on it. And also in Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia, Finland, and Sweden. Windstar take me there.
I’ve been to some of these places before. When I lived in Europe (Brussels, Belgium) I went to Helsinki, Finland three times for work-related meetings. Later I traveled to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and Bergen. This trip will bring me to many new places, including Russia, which seems appropriate given the current state of political affairs in the USA.
I’ll be aboard the Windstar yacht Star Breeze, a small ship with only 200 of my soon to be closest friends. I had sailed the Windstar’s Wind Surf in the Caribbean a few years ago and this ship is similar, but without the sails. Think of something a billionaire might own and that’s the Star Breeze. These small yachts are much better than the big hotel ships that hold 4000 or more people. Much more intimate.
We’ll leave from Copenhagen (see links above for some of my previous activities there), then head straight for the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. After touring the island we’ll head for Gdansk, Poland. Hopefully you’ve heard of Gdansk as it has played a critical role at least twice in European history. Gdansk was the site of the first shots fired in World War II. It was also where Lech Walesa, a shipyard electrician who later became President of Poland, started the Solidarity trade union movement that eventually led to the fall of communism in Poland. I’ll spend some time in the shipyards and the old city, and perhaps even sail on a 17th Century galleon.
Westerplatte monument, Gdansk
But that’s only the beginning. We’ll head up to Klaipeda, Lithuania and tour the Curonian Peninsula, then hop over Latvia to Estonia where we’ll hike around the lower and upper old towns of Tallinn. And then it’s on to St. Petersburg, home of the Hermitage and the Imperial City. This will be my first foray into Russia. Following two days there it’s back to Helsinki, where my personal experience will let me guide tours around the main part of the city and then see (for the first time) the Church of the Rock. A leisurely biking tour of the Finnish island of Mariehamn will help get my land legs back before arriving in Stockholm and back to the US.
I haven’t spoken much about my travel schedule this year for a reason that will become clear later, but I’m scheduled to be seeing a good part of the world during the next 12 months. Locations already in the works are a road trip through the Pacific Northwest, another road trip through Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois, a Windstar cruise from Hong Kong to Singapore (with stops in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei), and maybe, just maybe, a visit to the seventh (or perhaps eighth, depending on how you count) continent. Then there is the month in Paris (for research, I swear) and a ton of other domestic and international travel in the plans. I’ll write more as they come to fruition, and will post tons of photos and stories as they happen.
Before then I have to step up my writing pace. Too many books in the works and too many other activities (not to mention the travel) have slowed my writing progress. But hey, as Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said: “Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing about.” At least I’m doing the latter.
Off to write, perchance to dream.
David J. Kent is the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity (2013) and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (2016) and two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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