Journalist Pat Woods just cruised on Eurodam’s 10-night Baltic cruise and chronicled her journey for us. Enjoy!

After 14 years as desert dwellers, the Baltic’s 66-degree June weather is a treat. The Baltic Sea is smooth, and the Eurodam seems to skim lightly on the water without any noticeable motion of the ocean. Our sea day began with a hearty room service breakfast followed by an 8 am church service. Rob attended Microsoft photo editing and Window 8 classes, while I shot photos around the ship.

After the art auction, we enjoyed an elegant lunch buffet in the main dining room. For me, it was seafood nirvana with jumbo shrimp, crab legs and mussels. During lunch, the Captain explained the origin of nautical terms knots (speed) and log books.

After lunch, we attended the interesting cruisecritic.com Meet-and-Greet to match faces with forum screen names. Among the 45 attending, we met three other Arizona couples. To work off calories, we swam laps in lido pool for 30 minutes in the pleasant Baltic sunshine.

Our formal night dinner in Pinnacle Grill began with five types of bread served with three flavors of butter. The Pinnacle Grill’s menu ($25 pp) is the same on other HAL ships. For starters, we both ordered lobster bisque and crab cakes. Our charming Indonesian servers presented Rob with generous portions of surf-and-turf. My stacked lobster tail was the most flavorful ever, and our grilled asparagus was vegetable perfection.

Silk Den.

We hope the five pounds we both lost pre-cruise will not find us again!