Okay boys and girls, prepared to be bored to death with the latest from uncle Ron's slideshow....hehehe...

These pictures are from my latest trip (to St. Petersburg) to visit with my new fiancee and her family...my mother traveled with me (she was bored and begged me to take her with me as she has not traveled much and was jealous of hearing of my travels) so I brought her with me and our families met and had a wonderfull time. It really was the best time I ever had in my life.
My fiancee was the most wonderfull woman I have ever met (besides my mother of course, ;) ) And her boys, which are almost exactly the same ages as my sons were great, and her mother is also an incredible woman, a medical doctor who still practices despite her age. We were instantly family and got along very well.
She speaks fluent English, and her sons and mother speak it fairly well also...and that is very nice of course.

She (my fiancee) had taken off work for the entire 2 weeks we visited and made an itenery for us which included many excursions to many of the palaces and cathedrals as well as the mind-numbing Hermitage....which contains more of the works of art than anywhere else in the world! It has most of Rembrant's works as well as many Picasso paintings and other artists I cannot even recall....

Anyways after a week and a half of seeing palace after palace....and cathedral after cathedral...it got to be too much, like overload...just one giant hall after another filled with 60' columns of granite, gold plated ceilings and walls and balconies...statues and precious stones assembled together in such massive quantities, floor after floor of intricate granite and marble design.... after a while we both were numbed by it all, it was too much.
We now understand why the Bolshedek revolution occured, a few families were catered to by millions of serfs and that is why all this wealth was so concentrated...

Anyways I spent an hour or so modifying the resolution on some pictures and those are forthcoming...