After a late arrival into Helsinki the previous night we had a rather late start to the day managing only to accomplish the ‘chores’ (fill up with water and diesel) before we made our way over to the ferry terminal to catch our 13:30hrs ride over to Estonia.
We made a quick stop off at the electrical store in the port area and treated ourselves to an inverter for the car. The inverter would enable us to charge our gadgets such as the laptop, camera battery etc. while we are driving instead of frequenting McDonalds with the power board and all the thingamajigs.
We had pre booked the trip across the Gulf of Finland with the ferry company Tallink. We thought we might try our luck at pretending our van was 2.4m high instead of 2.9m and 7m in length instead of 8m, as nobody had checked or seemed to care on the previous ferry journeys we had taken. In fact you could probably smuggle a dozen or so Albanians in the back of the van and they wouldn’t have had a clue.
Nonetheless, this time our luck had run out as the lady immediately asked us how high the van was. We answered her truthfully, as we suspected the cameras we were parked under were telling her exactly how high it was and she was setting us up for a fine or to just let us off with the additional fee. We handed over the cash thankful that there wasn’t a penalty involved and drove onto the ferry for the two-hour journey across.
On arrival into Tallinn we headed straight for the marina camping ground we had seen on the Internet. Yes, that’s right we were planning our first paid camping visit after wild camping for just over a month. We were dying to wash our clothes, charge the leisure battery and treat ourselves to some campground relaxation, which basically entails getting the awning out, cranking the music up and using all the power we can.
Once checked in Luke did his ‘man stuff’ and I got cracking on the three loads of washing that had mounted up over the last month. For some reason it is extremely rare for Estonians to have a dryer so each load was hung up in and around the van making us look like massive gypsies. Thankfully we had very strong winds so the washing dried extremely fast.
 |
| Luke cooking a BBQ in the laundry. |
 |
| We scared people off with the copious amounts of washing we had up drying. |
We soaked up the rest of the evening sun (and wind) with drinks and a BBQ dinner, which was then followed by a magical sunset over the harbor.
 |
| Sunset over the marina with the ducks. |
 |
| Olympic memorial - home of the Sailing Moscow 1980. |
 |
| Fishermen and the sunset. |
No comments:
Post a Comment