Category: Estonia

Last night we were talking that although we have been following the coast of the Baltic Sea for the last week we have not really seen it so we decided today was going to be our day to get a look at the Baltic Sea.

We choose the city of Parnu to be our window to the Baltic Sea. Neither one of us had heard of it, but we read it was the beach resort of choice for Tallinn. A google search said it had a nice 2 kilometer beach. Furthermore it had a well reviewed campground in town so our destination for today was set.

When we woke Ton asked how the washer and dryer looked here, and when I told her they looked nice and modern, out start south was delayed by 3 hours to get a load of laundry done. Every day we get the laundry done is a good day for Ton.

We were finally on the way by noon but we covered the 120 kilometers in a little over an hour as the traffic was quite light. The only thing of interest on the drive was the high volume of military vehicles heading North. It looks like the Estonian army has been doing some kind of joint exercise with the British as while the majority of vehicles were Estonian a few were British.

After settling in to a river front campground we headed to the old town. The old town was about 8 by 5 blocks, with a pedestrian promenade thru the middle. While it was small it was very quaint and looked prosperous. Parnu has managed to keep a lot of the wooden buildings that used to be a hall mark of Estonian architecture and many of them have been converted to pretty posh restaurants.

After spending 45 minutes or so investigating the old town we headed to the beach. The walk to the beach was on a beautiful tree lined road lined with stately homes, apartments, and schools. Most of them looked to come from around the turn of the 20th century.

The beach is as good as any we have seen in Europe. It is about 400 meters wide and a couple of kilometers long. The water is supposed to warm up quite nicely in the short summer here because the bay it is located on is quite shallow. One of the symbols of the town is an elephant for reasons we did not find out, so there are several statues of elephants in the beach.

The last thing I want to comment on is how tall Latvians and Estonians are. Ton has spent the last week pointing out how many of the women here are taller than me. (I am 5’10). Today we came across group of 12 late high school or university students. The shortest male was around 6’2 and the rest were 6’4 to 6’6. All of the women were 6′ to 6’2″. Apparently Latvians are the tallest people in the world, but the Estonians can’t be far behind.

Ton had made a nice list of places to visit today in Tallinn, so we were off early. The train in from the campground took about 1/2 hour and we both got senior discounts so our round trips were €3.80 each. It was a much more modern train than the one in Lithuania, both quieter and faster between stations.

The Baltic States are my first experience of countries that had been under the direct rule of the Soviet Union. We have traveled in most of the countries that found themselves behind the Iron Curtain after WWII, and they were interesting and the influence of the Soviet Union can be felt. But the Baltic States were actually part of the USSR after WWII.

Of the 3 countries Estonia seems to have moved the farthest away from its Soviet past. A lot of the Soviet era buildings have been removed and replaced with more modern buildings. The concrete block apartments are not as bleak here and the housing in the countryside looks prosperous. Incomes in Estonia are about 20% higher than the other two. Lithuania to me felt the most unchanged. The countryside had a gray feeling with many of the farm houses bare stone or concrete. The apartment blocks look unappealing, and a lot of the old factories are rotting. Having said that Lithuania has the biggest population and the biggest GDP. Lithuania and Latvia have lost population with a lot immigration to other parts of the EU. Estonias population has stayed the same, but it still the smallest of the three.

Tallinn has been a successful port town for hundreds of years and the prosperity shows thru in the old town. It feels a lot like the German cities further west. It’s history roughly parallels Riga’s with the same succession of conquerors, but the people speak a non-slavic language related to Finnish.

Riga and Tallinn seem to have a friendly rivalry with both claiming some of the same accomplishments. Tallinn says they had the first public display of a Christmas Tree, but Riga makes the claim of having the first public display of a decorated Christmas Tree.

There are not as many churches in Tallinn as in Riga, Catholicism was the primary religion in Riga, while here it was Protestant, and of course both cities had sizable Orthodox communities after 200 years of Russian rule.

We enjoyed our self guided tour of Tallinn and ended it by treating ourselves to a lunch at the same restaurant as we had eaten in Riga. The food was equivalent, but it cost more in Tallinn, we really like Lido restaurants and will miss them when we leave Estonia and Latvia.

What is interesting about both cities is that while they are both Baltic Sea towns the sea is not in sight from the old town. Walking around you do not feel the influence of the port in the old town.

We have been having a small issue with François. The sensor in the gray water tank has gone bad. We had it worked on in Krakow, they cleaned it and the tank and for a couple of days it was ok, and then started to malfunction again. It is not a big problem as the sensor is only there to tell you when the gray water tank is approaching 100% of capacity, that is never a problem for us, and in 6 years we never allowed it to get too full. The problem is that the way it tells you it is full is by an annoying beep. Over the length of the trip it has been falsely telling us the tank is full once or twice per day by beeping at us. We had decided to ignore it until we could schedule François into a service center a the end of the trip, or the beginning of the next one and had learned how to sleep thru a single stray beep in the middle of the night.

But last night it started to go off over and over. Around 3 am it began beeping every 15 minutes or so keeping us both from sleeping. I finally got up and looked for a service place in Riga, but I could not find one. I then looked in Talinn Estonia and found a place. Around 5 am with the alarm still beeping every 15 minutes or so, I sent them an email and explained the problem and told them we were on the way. We were on the road by 7am and arrived after an easy drive on quiet roads in Talinn at 11:30.

I discussed the problem with the service manager of the dealer, and said if he could not fix the sensor, could he at least silence the alarm so we could sleep at night. Then we asked him where we could get lunch as we had skipped breakfast to get on the road. He told us about a local restaurant nearby and told us to be back in 2 hours.

The restaurant he recommended was a small cafeteria in an office building. The food was good and inexpensive. After an hour and a half he emailed and told us the fix was done. When we arrived he said he did not have the part so he turned off the alarm. We were more than pleased, and headed happily down the road to a very nice campground in the country near Talinn.

We then both settled in for a nap for a couple of hours. Tomorrow we will be back in tourist mode and there will be pictures for the blog.