To Russia and back

Yesterday, Sue and I got back from a cruise to the Baltic that took in visits to Norway, Denmark, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Germany. Despite some inclement weather, it was a great trip, and I have a lot to write about what we did and saw. Hopefully I'll be able to do that by the end of the week, but in the meantime we have a lot of things to do before I can devote the necessary time to write a copious blog entry about the cruise.

On the wargaming front, I did manage to do some work on a second version of my terrain generator during some of the sea days (i.e. days when we were not in port). The main changes relate to the order in which terrain is located (I have moved hills and mountains to first position in the order) and the addition of railways and fields. I've also tried to simply some of the the mechanisms used in the rules, and added rules of the pacing of contiguous terrain (e.g. to create a range of hills or an urban area that covers more than one grid area). Hopefully I'll be able to share that with my regular blog readers later this week.

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When we first went to St Petersburg, the 'cruise terminal' was a couple of large huts in the middle of the main dock area, and its road access went through a scrapyard! More recently, the local city government has built a much large and prestigious cruise terminal further from the centre of the city. As the photograph below shows, it can accommodate up to six cruise liners at a time.

Things have certainly moved on in the past ten years, and the whole place feels far more prosperous than it used to.