Yalta

Yalta is a town of about 90,000 but the only industry is tourism.  It had a Euro Myrtle Beach feel.

We visited the White Palace in Livadia, the former summer palace of Czar Nicholas II and the site where Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met in 1945 to determine the shape of post-World War II Europe.  During the conference they went through 5000 bottles of wine, 6300 bottles of beer, and 1/2 ton of caviar. Roosevelt predicted that the solutions arrived at the conference would last 50 years and he was only 5 years off (making him a pretty good politician).

Pit stop at a random castle

It was beautiful

Denim Huggies making a comeback!

Front of the palace (nice summer home)

After lunch we went to Massandnra Winery (biggest in the country). The winery mostly makes dessert wines because of the climate and also have the most Grand Prix awards (an award for wine).  A wine bottle from 1775 is being sold for $170,000.  There are three levels of wine, ordinary-stored for one year, fine wine-stored for a year and a half, and collection-no less than five years.

Check out all that wine!

Apparently the more dust the better...

Gulp!

Time for a tasting

These are the ones we tasted

The winery

This bus made me laugh

That truck was full of wine!

Bye bye, I will miss you:)

Now, to drive the point that we were the youngest on the boat here is a pic of our dinner table "regulars"

Patrick, Mandy, Hill (73), Edna (91), Heather (72), Jack (92), JD , and Vicky

Hill liked to party!