Red October

I guess it would be worthwhile to follow up the Russia posts with a post about how great the tour company we used was. Umma had booked our tour through Red October. I think I mentioned it in another post, but it would have been fairly difficult to obtain visas to go do St. Petersburg on our own like we did with the other ports of call. We could have gone with a shore excursion through NCL, but they were not quite as tailored to what we wanted to do as the Red October tours were.

Although we've had fun on all of our self-guided tours through Europe, we got a LOT out of our trip to St. Petersburg by having a guide. We did a lot and walked a lot those two days, I think even moreso than we did on some of our other stops. Somehow, however, they managed to pace us on this tour in a way where we weren't quite as exhausted by the end of the day. The tour guide new when to go to places and when to avoid the places by the plague. We essentially got to see the Hermitage Museum free of most crowds. That's not something we would have been able to do on our own and, judging by the slew of NCL stickers we saw on the way out, we probably would not have gotten it through a shore excursion with the ship.

Our tour guide was also a lot of fun and we had a great driver.

So all in all, kudos to Red October for making our trip to St. Petersburg so great.