Since we didn’t have any breakfast plans, we didn’t rush out of bed at 8am on Tuesday morning. We leisurely woke up about 10am and took an hour or so to get out of the hotel.

Our plan for the day was visiting Red Square, GUM and the Kremlin. We walked over the bridge into Red Square, stopping to take photos of one of the “seven sisters” on the way (I’m not sure which one – the one to the east when you’re standing on the bridge in the middle of the Moskva river – possibly Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya).
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To connect with the flight to Moscow, we had to get the 0605 flight from Leeds Bradford to Amsterdam. Ugh. I am so grateful we only live ten minutes from the airport. There wasn’t much of a queue at check-in (unlike at the adjacent Jet2 counter) and we got through the security-pantomime checks pretty quickly. We had a bit of breakfast in the cafe, marvelling at the buckets of coffee and many pints of beer that were being consumed by our fellow passengers. At 5am. Ahem.

The flight to Amsterdam went smoothly and we arrived on time. Much to our amazement, we arrived at the gate next to the one we were departing from and said gate didn’t change repeatedly while we were waiting. I almost missed our usual 10km hike across Schipol.
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I’ve wanted to go to Russia for as long as I can remember – and my reading over the last couple of years (particularly about the Siege of Leningrad and the Gulags) has only increased that desire. Last year, when we were planning the holiday that became Budapest, I contemplated Moscow instead (I didn’t know then that the visa requirement would have made such a last-minute trip almost impossible) but John, who was looking for an excuse to get a better camera, said we should wait until we could do the trip photographic justice. So a year on, equipped with the fruits of John’s current consumer obsession, we went on a two city break: Moscow and St Petersburg, with a night on the sleeper train inbetween.

• Monday 29th August
• Tuesday 30th August
• Wednesday 31st August
• Thursday 1st September
• Friday 2nd September
• Saturday 3rd September
• Final thoughts on the holiday (coming soon)

(Full photo gallery to follow)

– written up at the start of September, 2005

Sunday started in the same way as Saturday: up earlier than normal for a cooked breakfast and hypnotic staring over the bay. After breakfast and a digestion-aiding rest, we checked out of the hotel and started the drive home.
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We woke at about 8am so we could go down for a hearty Scottish breakfast to start the day. I didn’t mention it in the Friday entry but the bay-facing side of the dining room is purely picture windows so no one actually speaks in there, everyone is just hypnotised by the view. As for the breakfast, the croissants weren’t the freshest I’ve ever tasted (they tasted like they were the long life type) but the cooked part of it was good and filled us up for most of the day. (And no, we didn’t have any haggis.)
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