Dreams do come true. 22/08/2016

Am sitting with my lovely Toshiba on the lovely balcony of the lovely cabin 9275 on the lovely Celebrity Eclipse. Heaven. Wrapped up in the pristine dressing gown,another gown covering my legs. Yes, I have two of them in the cabin [not legs, dressing-gowns!],as I am paying for 2 people. This is the way it is. If you book a single cabin for one, you pay the single cabin price. If you book a double cabin just for one person, you pay the full price for two. I have been once only in an inside stateroom. It was on Queen Mary several years ago,a Christmas cruise for four nights.When booking there was only one cabin with balcony left and I wanted my sister and her husband to occupy it. My stateroom was large and perfectly nice with a brand new carpet. But never again. I want to see the sea, the same yet ever changing horizon of the rippling waves. I never draw the curtains and often sit on the balcony even in the wind, sometimes wrapped up in a duvet, half asleep half awake remembering what will never come back again... my Olly.The pain has become my friend and my enemy...And then the tears come,quite involuntarily... a sea of them, an ocean...So after two days in St.Petersburg we are on our way to Germany. I had booked three tours in this magnificent Russian city. The first, on Saturday,was to Tsarskoye Selo and Catherine Palace,the royal summer residence. The amber room at the Palace,considered the 8th wonder of the world by the Russians,was beyond belief,fully restored at quite an expense as has the rest of the building. St.Petersburg has more palaces than any other city I have been to. You drive through the streets and there they stand in their glory,one after another,massive,splendid. The obscene wealth of the pampered few must have been breathtaking. Only when you see this do you begin to understand why there was a revolution in 1917,why Tzar Nicholas and his family were killed and what had contributed to the horror that followed for decades with the life and soul destroying gulags,the secret service mercilessly weeding out" the enemies of the state."  When I read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita for the first time,the book instantly became my favourite book of all time. There are passages that broke my heart and still do. The tour took four hours and even though the guide was in a class of her own,[her knowledge and memory astonishing],the bus very comfortable and the itinerary on a normal day absolutely splendid,this didn't turn out to be a normal day by any means. It was a heavens opened up day when all the rain tried to come down all at once on this Saturday 20 August 2016! Was I glad to be under the roof of the Eclipse! Lunch and warm bed. And then at 5 a miracle - the clouds had disappeared just like that,and the sun popped out, strong, magnificent,as if it had never been away. And shining directly on my balcony. In a flash I was lying on the sun-deck in the alltogether until the sun went down. A perfect end to a not perfect yet still somehow very satisfying ,gloriously happy day.