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Cruise Review Baltic Vacation on HAL's Oosterdam Travel to Europe to begin our Oosterdam cruise ship vacation.
Cruise reviews - Our travel experiences as we make our way to the Oosterdam for our Baltic Cruise
Finally the journey begins; getting to the Oosterdam was quite an experience.
It's 4:00 a.m. and the town car we arraigned to pick us up arrives. We load in our suitcases and off to the Portland international airport we go. Final destination... The Baltic and the HAL Oosterdam in Europe
Our flight on Southwest Airlines leaves Portland at 6:00 a.m., and our first stop and plane change is in Kansas City. Kansas City is warm and sunny and we spend about two hours before our next flight which took us to the Midway airport in Chicago where we didn't leave the plane. After a short stop the plane took off for Providence Rode Island. We have to leave for Europe and the Baltic from the east coast.
In Providence we took a Taxi cab to the Amtrak station. It was at this point, at least in my mind, we discovered that we had too many pieces of luggage. One huge suitcase, one large suitcase, one small suitcase, two hanging bags, one tote bag, and a camera bag with the video camera and all of the cables for the digital camera and video camera, extra batteries etc. The tote bag had miscellaneous things like our reading material and laptop computer etc. . The tote bag was quite heavy. I have to Haul this all the way to the Oosterdam? Jeeze.
Trying to get all of those bags from the Taxi down to the Amtrak tracks was quite difficult. We managed to do it, but Kathy and I were purple from exertion by the time we got to the train, which was ready to leave except a conductor was holding the door open so we could catch it.
The train ride was only about an twenty minutes long, and I would have checked out the cafe car except I was still trying to recover from getting the bags down the stairs and to the train. We hailed a taxi and proceeded to the hotel.
Next door to our hotel, the Four Points by Sheraton, was a bar and grill where we had a light dinner of soup. We asked for the Clam Chowder and were told that they only had one bowl left at the bottom of the pot and since theirs had been named the "Best Clam Chowder in Boston" the refused to serve the bottom of the pot.
The next morning we decided to go sight seeing in Boston since our plane to Europe didn't leave Logan International airport until 7:00 p.m..
The Sheraton was only about two miles from the subway system and we took the free hotel shuttle to the subway station where we caught the subway train to "Government Station", which is where we got off and did our sight seeing. We really enjoyed Faneuill Market Place and of course we visited Filene's Basement!
After spending the morning sight seeing in Boston we took the subway to it's end where we called the hotel and they sent the shuttle to pick us up. As it turns out the taxi ride from the train station to the hotel was unnecessary as we found out that the shuttle would have picked us up for free and taken us right to the hotel. LOL
This time handling our luggage was a little easier. The shuttle took us to the airport where we rented one of those little luggage carts, and rolled it on into the terminal. We discovered at the check in counter that we were only allowed to check four pieces of luggage and to check our 5th piece would cost an additional $90.00. So we took one of our hanging bags as carry on.
The plane was a DC10 and the flight to Amsterdam was about 6-1/2 hours. It was an uneventful trip. As seems to be typical we had barely enough time to get from one end of the airport to the other to catch our flight to London. The flight to London took about and hour and a half.
Kathy had arraigned for a car to pick us up and take us to the Thistle hotel in London, which is only about a block from Trafalgar Square.
We arrived at about 9:00 in the morning, and since our room wasn't going to be ready until 2:00 p.m., we had the hotel lock up our luggage and we set out on foot to begin our exploration of London.
We will continue our adventures on the next page.
The rest of this page is devoted to photographs of our sight-seeing in Boston.
Here are some photos we took during our short visit to Boston.