The Baltic was kind again to us with a smooth overnight passage as we cruised to Travemunde.
My first views of Travemunde were as Aurora was turning around in the river to reverse onto her berth.
Our Baltic cruise on P&O Aurora would take us to Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Denmark and Norway.
Day 12 was Wednesday 24th May and sailed into Travemunde on Germany’s Baltic shore
Travemunde, Germany
Aurora was docked in the general port area as Travemunde doesn’t have a cruise terminal.
Breakfast with the ship’s guest speaker
We had a leisurely breakfast in the Medina restaurant. We joined a table with the lady whao was the guest speaker on the cruise. She knew our village of Crowthorne after having been a visitor at nearby Broadmoor Hospital.
Her talks this cruise were not about serial killers and the like but about human psychology covering subjects such as procrastination. As a speaker on a cruise she would be given two tickets. On this particular cruise their cabin was on the decks of the shop allocated for crew. Their meals were in the passenger’s restaurant. Part of the responsibility of being ‘below’ was having a safety talk about how to close the water tight doors of the ship in the lower decks.
Guest speaker cabins were allocated according to availability and on some cruises they would be in passenger staterooms rather then in crew quarters. P&O, Cunard etc. provided them with a list of dates of cruises as the cruise lines planned their cruises. This would often be a year in advance of these cruises being marketed to customers. They would then nominate which cruises they would like to be on as speakers.
So far this year they had been on three cruises. One of these was as a replacement speaker at relatively short notice. This could have been as a result of a speaker cancelling (because of illness for example) or perhaps a new speaker had not met with passenger approval and had been ‘retired’.
After breakfast we caught the shuttle bus into Travemunde passing through an area full of containers and other goods on open trailers. This area was part of the port and was the reason why pedestrian access to Travemunde was not possible.
In Travemunde
Walking past the shops and restaurants we headed towards the tall hotel at the side of the beach. This is reputed to be the tallest building along the Baltic.
To our right was the river with moored boats next to the promenade. There were foot ferries that went backwards and forwards to where the sailing boat Passat was moored.
After the shops and assorted restaurants we came to the more usual stalls at a seaside resort selling jewellery and ice cream. There was even a big wheel placed next to an old lighthouse.
At six Euros a go no-one had decided to ride on the big wheel this early in the day. This mobile big wheel had this diagram showing how the family’s big wheels had grown over the years since WWII.
Travemunde’s lighthouse.
At the hotel the promenade turned left and we now had the beach and the sea on our right. Just then a Luftwaffe Tornado screamed low over our heads so suddenly that I didn’t have time to raise my camera.