Another Country, Estonia or Eestland, Eestie!

The booze boat from Stockholm to Tallinn docked with much pushing and scrambling to get off. I call it the booze boat because is a duty free ferry for many Swedes to enjoy cheap drinking overnight to Estonia & back. The corridors are narrow, think about 800mm, your corridors at home are about 1m minimum. So approximately 2,000 people are trying to get off the ferry down the corridors and the usual idiots are out of their rooms, still packing their bags on the floor in the corridor,duh! they seem to be working in pairs to add to the confusion, christ knows what would happen if the ship caught fire and or was sinking!! In the resulting melee I lost my riding gloves. Or they were stolen by the owner of the brand spanking Ferrari who parked his red rocket next to my bike. He probably needed a pair of gloves for his sojourn down the Autobahn to see if the Bontrager gloves can handle 200+ kph.

We leave Stockholm on the booze boat, with a little bit of drizzle in no way dampening our memories of Sweden & Norway. We love you guys and girls.

A couple of hours in Tallinn old city is far from enough. A friend Les Doyle, said that Tallinn is his favourite city in Europe. I would have to say that, although we did not stay very long he may be correct, it is stunning! Well in the running with all those oohh, ahhh cities and towns in Italy, France etc.

Off down the road to the south, yee hahh we are really on the way now. Great bike paths out of the city along the coast to the south west. We stop for lunch at a bench on the bike path. Bullrushes between us and the sea. The back of a big new building between the bike path and the road. We are about finished so I wander around the building to hunt down some caffeine. Lo and behold a huge bike shop facing the street occupies half of the space of the building. A brand new pair of Roeckl riding gloves for Eu 12.95.

 Generally nice riding through the day, a little bit of busy road, but good weather. Towards the end of the day as we are dutifully following the purple line on the Garmin we arrived at our proposed campsite after half an hour on dirt, we get told it's full with a private group. Dosent look full to us but with no Estonian and the owner on the other end of the phone speaking very little anglaise we are screwed. Long story short, we are in a beach resort spa hotel for the night.

The beach in the morning after our first night in Estonia.

Our miss fortune or camp miss adventure turned out brilliantly. After lunch the next day we met up with a great young Estonian girl on her baby blue bike commuter bike, and inquired about some directions. In my overtly inquisitive way we find out that she is heading for a campground about 40kms away that would surely have space for us too. So we cheekily end up asking her if we could follow her to the campground. She speaks great English and turns out to be excellent company, and has gained a free home stay in Australia if she ever decides to visit.

Liis and Jeanette (kindered spirits I think) at our quiet & quaint campground

Can you imagine you are 24ish, out for a long weekend bike trip to visit a national park on your 2nd ever bike trip on your own and these two grey haired 60+ year olds latch on to you for 24 hours.

This is again what I love about riding my bike, the people of the countries we visit.

Too much about the 1st day's ride but it highlighted our lack of ability to understand how campgrounds are advertised or marketed on the digital and paper media that we have available.

Although Liis was heading for a national park that was very appealing to Jeanette we decided to continue south as there are only so many places of interest we can visit.

A quick couple of pics of old Tallinn town.