ESTONIA - twenty-four hours, short but sweet

Now this is what I call a luxurious shuttle service, padded lounges, poker machines, duty free drinks, meals & free wifi, everything you could need for just 2 hours! Naturally we drank the water & ate the M&Ms that we brought with us & used their wifi the entire trip, got to get your monies worth.

Bit bright but you get the idea, huge picture windows and three or four floors of seating,
all able to see out the front & watch the stage should there be a performance

Unbelievably the walkway to the ferry and from the ferry at the other end must have been a kilometre long, gee we were glad we only had a small backpack each, there were plenty of people dragging or carrying huge bags. There were also lots of young people with folded luggage trolleys. We found out on the way back what they were for, tell you later...

When we left the terminal there was a Hop on-Hop off bus waiting at the stop so we hopped on, as you do when you have no idea where you are going. They are generally good value to help you get your bearings & believe it or not the fire station that Grant wanted to visit was the very first point of interest on the trip. It is very old and has a most unusual drying tower that was also used as a lookout before the invention of the phone. We completed a full circuit and got off next time the bus passed the fire station. Grant visited - I slept, on the shaded grass of the park across the road, beautiful - children playing, mothers with prams, lovely feel to the place (lucky Grant left that half packet of M&Ms he was gone for an hour & I was hungry).

Historic tower and Fire Station

Once he returned we walked to the tourist information office which is inside the medieval walled city centre. Naturally we detoured to the markets (multiple ones seemed to be all over the place but we were told later that it is a special festival week and that the markets are mostly not permanent), picking up a few postcards and a couple of gifts. I would have loved to get a piece of knitwear but I just don't have the use for such heavy/thick items no matter how beautiful or how cheap they are.

Where is Rapunzel?  Viru entrance gates to the old city 

Then into the city itself, my goodness the buildings were gorgeous, there were cafes spilling out onto every street, locals in national dress, waitresses dressed for the occasion & live music on a stage in the main Town Square. Great fun, loads of people, lots of movement & decorations. We walked & walked, had dinner in a traditional restaurant below street level. Grant was really adventurous (that is tongue in cheek of course as he has never been adventurous with food) & chose PIZZA, me on the other hand chose chicken breast in red wine sauce with peppered vegetables & decorated with piped chicken liver pate. Absolutely gorgeous! We were given rye bread that was heavy as a rock to have with it, not too bad really if you put plenty of butter on it.

Street-side cafes, World Heritage buildings & loads of people

Next job, find our way to our accommodation since it was about 7pm already. After a couple of 'bum-steers' we finally got onto Route 18 bus and headed south-west out of the city into the suburbs. I had had great difficulty finding accommodation because of the festival so we had to go a fair way out for cheap accommodation. We ended up not paying for the bus trip as I couldn't find anywhere to buy a ticket & the bus driver didn't sell them, oh well, that saved us a few euro. We got off the bus, double checked the map in the bus shelter & headed into suburbia.

These cobbled streets may be great for traction & water removal when it snows,
but they are really hard to walk on, thank goodness this street had footpaths

What a beautiful suburb it was, overhanging trees on the street, cobblestone roads, huge homes (many of them in the classic timber styles of a couple of hundred years ago) on very large blocks of land. We found out later that this was a really wealthy area & that the homes would have been worth maybe a million euro each. Our accommodation was cheap (only 40 euro for the room and then 10 euro for two breakfasts) so it was worth the bus trip.

A good night's sleep and a text from the station chief of the fire station, would you like me to drive you on a sight-seeing trip round the city this morning? Yes please! He picked us up at 9 am at our hotel and we spent the next 4 hours touring all the 'secret' spots that only someone born here knows about. We had such a lovely morning, Stas is a real character & so funny, we finished off with a hot chocolate on the 24th floor of the Radisson Blue Hotel in central Tallin. The 360 degree views were amazing.

The little shack that Peter the Great, Tzar of Russia, built for his wife Catherine,
also had its own lake, canals, formal gardens & parklands

Back to D Terminal at the port where the shuttle ferries depart, we got tickets then rushed to the gate as boarding closed in 10 minutes, boy we cut that fine! Now about those empty luggage trolleys, apparently alcohol is much cheaper in Estonia (not to mention Duty Free on board the ship) so young Finnish people travel over, load up their trolleys with slabs of all sorts of drinks & go partying in Tallin, then back the next day to Finland with their stash, plenty of people with 8-10 slabs of drinks on the one trolley struggling along the catwalks & escalators. 

Downloaded photos, ate hot chips for lunch, caught up on some emails (gee, free wifi on board was handy) by which time we had arrived in Helsinki.

Next stop Turku....