![\"Helsinki](\"https:\/\/mwenda.com\/teletype\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/GullWing.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nHome turf of the Hanseatic League, later the heart of a Swedish empire, for decades a sort of liquid Iron Curtain; why not spend a couple weeks on the Baltic Sea? We combined this idea with a Backroads bicycle trip<\/a> that included passage aboard an innovative new ship.<\/p>\n We first spent some time on our own in Stockholm, as previously reported;<\/a> that entry includes a link to an account of our visits to a couple of Baltic islands<\/a> that gave us our first closeup look at this inland sea.<\/p>\n The Baltic is different in several ways from other large bodies of water. On its surface, especially toward the north and east, it’s composed of fresh water bound for the ocean. At its Danish outlet, there’s salty water flowing in underneath, mixing only slowly with the brackish water above. The Baltic isn’t big enough to have significant tides of its own, and is protected from the tides of the Atlantic. One other big difference from, say, the Mediterranean, is the northerly location. During some winters the Baltic freezes over from end to end. We were careful to confine our visit to the month of August.<\/p>\n Unreasonably good weather allowed us to enjoy a lot of scenery.\u00a0 The picture at the top of the page is a look aft as we enter the harbor at Helsinki, our first stop after leaving Stockholm.\u00a0 It’s a great place for cycling, with waterside paths through birch forests.<\/p>\n The panorama below is from our ship’s berth in St. Petersburg.\u00a0 A craft our size is welcome right in the midst of things.\u00a0 That’s the gold dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral on the right, and just this side of the second bridge that’s the garden of the Winter Palace.<\/p>\n Our ship’s location, right there on the English Embankment, wasn’t the advantage that one might have supposed, though.\u00a0 These days, travelers from many nations, including the U.S., aren’t allowed ashore unless they have a guide or a special visa, obtained in advance.\u00a0 We contented ourselves this time with guided outings (and memories from our visit by train in May of 2000).<\/p>\n So biking in St. Petersburg was done with a local company, and using their little folding commuter bikes.\u00a0 (Alex and I managed to snag bicycles with bigger wheels, but weren’t any the happier for it.)<\/p>\n Divided into small groups and given tiny bicycles, a Backroads tour is still likely to block a thoroughfare. Here we gawk at St. Isaac’s. The big sculpture in the background is a wedding bouquet — the happy couple pose at left.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The need to use local bicycles points out another interesting thing about the trip. Our concept of the Backroads bike tour dates back to our first outing, in 1995, in the Gulf Islands.\u00a0 We envision two bright young leaders, one riding herd while the other drives a van along the route, providing water, snacks, repair service and perhaps the occasional lift when desired.\u00a0 Every couple of days a bus may materialize to move the entire group from one general location to the next.<\/p>\n On that first trip there happened to be only five guests.\u00a0 Later we would see a dozen, then two dozen, and eventually, on the Baltic cruise, forty.\u00a0 This has led to some big changes — one consequence being the difficulty of picking out “your” bicycle from among the fleet.\u00a0 (This task is eased only slightly by the fact that there are now more kinds of bicycles.)<\/p>\n From St. Petersburg, past Krohnshtadt and Kotkin Island,\u00a0land trails off gradually<\/p><\/div>\n To the tourist, much will seem familiar.\u00a0 Some architecture looks picturesque, but mostly just because it’s older.\u00a0 Restaurants offer lots of seafood, but none of it seems alien.\u00a0 There’s the possibility of hearing a Finnic language spoken (we skipped Uralic Latvia and Lithuania) but Slavic and North Germanic prevail, and English is now accepted everywhere.<\/p>\n The end of August, from the world’s longest wooden pier, in Sopot, near Gdansk.<\/p><\/div>\n There could be a mild surprise in store for bird watchers who have not been to northern or eastern Europe before.\u00a0 Crows here act the same, and they sound the same, but they look different.\u00a0 They’re best described as gray with black wings and heads.\u00a0 They’re the\u00a0hooded crow\u00a0(Corvus cornix<\/i>), the first crow named by Linnaeus.\u00a0 We don’t have good pictures because the adults are too wary to get within cellphone camera range.\u00a0 The young ones are naive (we were able to feed one in Tallinn) but they start out dark all over and so do not display the color difference well.\u00a0 All baby crows have blue eyes, but these are startlingly pale.<\/p>\n You’d have to look closely, but the picture below actually shows a ship approaching a navigation light.\u00a0 As intimate a sea as the Baltic is, it’s still vast enough to make humans look insignificant.<\/p>\n Our cruise ended in Copenhagen.\u00a0 This is what you’d like your bike path to look like!\u00a0 Half of the city’s workforce commutes by bicycle, so when it snows, the bike paths are cleared first.\u00a0\u00a0Our ship is docked just on the other side of the building to the right.<\/p>\n Cruise ships have put\u00a0 on a lot of weight in recent years.\u00a0 But, wait!\u00a0 What if, instead of trying to shoehorn a small city into a floating island, you took a yacht and scaled it up a bit?\u00a0 Le Dumont d’Urville\u00a0<\/em>is the newest of the dozen ships owned by the French line Ponant, and one of four its size named for explorers.\u00a0 (Jules Dumont d’Urville mapped much of the coast of Australia, and gave Micronesia and Melanesia their names.\u00a0 And Adelie Land, in Antarctica, after his wife.\u00a0 And thus the penguins also.)<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>But on this voyage, several factors meant that guests, vehicles, bicycles and some of the staff progressed along the course in different supply chains.\u00a0 Sometimes the bikes traveled by land or ferry and met us in port; other times, they had no choice but to gain passage with us.\u00a0 Support staff changed with changing venues.\u00a0 The relationship between steamship line and tour company is a new one (and the ship is itself brand-new):\u00a0 a method for crating up the bikes had to be invented, shortly before the first customers arrived.\u00a0 The logistics went off amazingly well.\u00a0 (Ours was the “return” section of the ship’s maiden cruise from Copenhagen — the various bike routes had already been run once, but in reverse order.)<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n