Our second day in St. Petersburg started very early. For some reason our alarm didn't go off so we were glad we also set a wakeup call. We grabbed breakfast in Topsiders before heading to Rockin Bar D for our shore excursion. We were going to tour the palaces in Pushkin and Peterhof. We boarded the bus and headed first to Pushkin. The palace there is the Palace of Katherine the Great. It was a beautiful palace and is in the process of being restored to its full...

Our intention was to sleep in this morning. We weren't scheduled to arrive in St. Petersburg until about 12:00 so there was really no need to be up early. That is exactly why I woke up at 4:10 am, just 3.5 hours after going to sleep. I decided if I was awake I would go do some laundry. There was nobody in the laundry room so I was able to put all three loads in the machine and start them. When I went back to move them to the dryer the card readers were offline a...