Not (Y)our father's Russia.

• Author: Jones, David T.
• Position: Country overview

"[Moscow] is distinctly a Russian city ..."

A Satchel Guide to Europe, 1911

It was the classic "bucket trip"--a journey of discovery to a long-anticipated geographic or intellectual Shangri-La before you "kicked the bucket." Despite having spent a 30-year career as a U.S. diplomat, primarily focused much of that period on East-West arms control negotiations, I never visited the then Soviet Union. Nor had my wife, who left the USSR as a refugee child, returned for over 60 years.

It was time to go, and a nice combination of an affordable river cruise opportunity and a pile of completed (and no looming) projects made it a guilt free expedition.

But what to see and how to get there? Russia is immense; even dismembered following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, it spans 11 time zones and is more a continent than a country. Nevertheless, the "what to see" question, was relatively simple: despite its breadth, the most accessible and historic portions of Russia are in the West. We wanted to see St Petersburg and Moscow and a river cruise meandered from one to the other through a river/lake/slave-labor-built canal system that for almost six months each year is ice-impassable. Our September 2011 trip was the penultimate voyage of the season.

Getting to the starting blocks, however, was not half the fun. In contrast to most countries that emphasize tourist friendly smiles, dour Russia requires a visa. And there the "fun" began. Blithely I believed that living within 15 driving minutes of the Russian Embassy and having dealt with visas professionally, it would be a relatively easy process; I need not employ a facilitator to obtain a visa. Wrong. The Russians chose July to switch from a paper visa application to an obligatory computer/Internet process--that was the only way one could create an application. Their site appeared to have been designed by 70-year-olds with no computer skills (any normal high school student could have done better). It was so bad that the Embassy offered apologies for its crashing failures (in bad English). Suffice it to say that after four visits to the Russian consulate, we secured our visas, but next time I'll pay the facilitator ransom and avoid the bureaucratic angst.

Nor will I kvetch about jet lag following nine flying hours (plus waiting time) between Philadelphia and St Petersburg. Experts postulate that you need one day to adjust for each time zone crossed (and more time the older you are--sigh); so when we...