We are off again soon!

   Last October we came across an amazing deal for a flight to Europe. Delta was having a special... $400 flights from the US to Spain. We already had an outline of our next European adventure and it did not include Spain. Tom and I spent time in Madrid in 2012.  However, with the ability to fly to Spain for $400 and then pretty much anywhere within Europe for approximately $100 on European airlines, we decided to make that our in and out country. No open jaw for us this time.

    This trip my sister Carrie will be traveling with Tom and I. We are headed to Berlin from Madrid and then onto Gdansk,Poland and Kaliningrad (A country belonging to Russia). We will also make several stops in Lithuania and we will travel on to Latvia and Estonia followed by St. Petersburg, Russia. The end of our trip will include Vienna, Austria, and a return trip to  Cesky Krumlov and Prague, Czech Republic. We hope to sneak in a trip to Bratislava while we are nearby. That will give us a count of 11 countries in 6 1/2 weeks.

   Airbnb's and hostels are booked and paid for, and with our flight taken care of long ago, the next order of business is our Russian visa. Cost of the visa is comparable to the cost of our entire flight to Spain! Common sense says that our Russian leg of the journey should've been saved for its own separate trip. We will be paying a lot of money for a visa that we will only use for five days. St. Petersburg is a place that all three of us have wanted to visit however, and with the unsettled nature of the relationship between our countries,we feel like this might be our only opportunity.