I am not on face book, a little afraid of using
that, but I do check in here often and like the
rest of you who have commented, I miss the
old crowd as well.

Same here.

We are planning aBaltic cruise in June-July of
2013 on Oceania and have lots of questions
we would like to ask you guys. Such as with
the three days we will be in St. Petersburg, we
only have scheduled one Tour, what is there
to do near the port for the other two days, and
will we need any documents when we are on
our own besides our passports. I sure miss all
the posts.

St. Petersburg is not set up to do on your own. It's not a port where
you will find public transportation.

Plus Russian law is that you need a visa anywhere in Russia except for
St. Petersburg for 72 hours or less AND you use either a ship's tour or
a tour with a licensed tour guide.

We used Alla 5 years ago, and were very pleased with her service. If I
were you, I'd look at the Baltic port section of cruisecritic to see
what folks are saying about guides these days. Once you have a roll
call, you could see if others wanted to share tours.

Our cruise for this summer (for our 35th anniversary) will be the NCL
Epic in the western Mediterranean.