Russia, well what a surprise, instead of seeing the dreary, dismal cities of images from the communist era we found beautiful, thriving, sophisticated places that rivalled any of the successful European cities. We felt quite apprehensive as we crossed the border into Russia & admittedly we drove past some undesirable places & when we reached our hotel it was quite hard to go out into the streets alone, in St Petersburg every building looks the same, they'...

Five days & three countries later we're now at the end of our trip through these unfortunately situated Baltic states. First was Lithuania followed by Latvia then on to Estonia all of whom have the misfortune of having borders with Russia & are close enough to the Scandinavian countries for them to have been a threat in bygone times. So these small,(the largest of which has 2 million people) strategic places have at one time or other been ruled by the Swe...

I think that this is the part of the world where all the fairy tales were written, it's a land of knights, castles, towers & dragons, you can almost picture a beautiful princess imprisoned in any number of inescapable places. However poor Poland certainly hasn't had a fairy tale existence, it's been a history of struggle & you have to admire the fortitude of the people, for a good hundred years Poland was even wiped off the map of Europe & even after ...

The days are flying by & finding it difficult to remember which country we're in let alone which king ruled where & who lived in that palace & who invaded who, absolute information overload, too much for my little brain I'm afraid. However, loved Budapest, a city filled with wall to wall traffic in little narrow streets, the Danube busy with tourist cruise boats & picturesque churches, castles & history. Our tour guide was a very entertaining...

Right, well that's Vienna done, now on our train to Budapest, think I could live in that beautiful city though, it's so sophisticated & cultured, a little like ourselves I'm sure you'll agree!!!! Stayed in a great hotel beside the main transport centre so we had 3 day passes & we were able to travel around freely ( when we had spare time which wasn't often), we were kept so busy visiting monasteries & palaces & touring the town. We had a great gui...