Stejan

Robert if you are in the UK then let me know when you plan to visit, where in the UK would you be going, maybe drop me an email on stejan75@gmail.com.

Robert I'm also looking to retire shortly so will hopefully be enjoying more cruises going forward. It would be good to join a roll call on CC, I will have to try and finish reviewing potential cruises and post a response!

Sorry for the delay in further replying. We greatly enjoyed many of the various ports on our Baltic cruise, Tallin and Stockholm were very good, as was Copenhagen although I had been there several times already with work. The ultimate port however was St Petersburgh and we were docked for two days and maximized the number of sites to visit by organizing a two day excursion package with Alla Tours, rather than using the cruise line trips. This smaller group tour in a minibus was excellent and ensured we saw all of the key attractions.

We are now thinking of taking a Mediterranean trip ourselves late summer/ autumn and like the idea of seeing the eastern end of the med, maybe starting in Venice or Rome and sailing around the Greek island, Croatia and Turkey.

As Cally suggested these are three very different types of holiday, to date we have only done large cruises ourselves, although we have also looked at some of the European river cruises that Viking offer and like the fact that they carry much smaller numbers of passengers, but potentially offering the same level of service as a large cruise ship.

If you have never been to Europe before maybe you should initially do a larger more mainstream cruise, choosing one that stops in a number of different countries like you suggested re Italy and Greece, as this would give you an initial taster for a variety of different locations, which may then tempt you back for future visits to Europe.

We have not yet done a Med cruise ourselves, even though we live in the UK. We did Alaska, the Caribbean and also the Baltic which was fabulous with the stop over in St Petersburgh, although we have also done a number of city breaks in Europe, so a cruise which stops in say Rome or Venice would allow you to see some great European cities and then onto maybe the Greek islands for some slower pace sun and relaxation.