I am writing this on the morning of the 20. I’m surprised we’re 20 days into this already. We were in the home stretch and we will be back in Florida before we know it. Before we get there though we have some cool things ahead of us. Today, for example we are in Estonia. How many people can you say you know have been to Estonia. Mary didn’t even know it is a country. We are in its capital named Tallinn. The ship only docked about an hour ago. We don’t have to get off for our bus trip until 12 o’clock. Mary went up and got breakfast and she brought me back some hash browns. She managed some of her pictures this morning. Between the Princess pictures and her camera pictures she probably has 2000 pictures now. I will write more when we return this afternoon. We are only in Estonia for about four hours. This weekend we are in St. Petersburg. We are both looking forward to that. But, that has to wait until it happens. That’s enough for now.
Saturday, September 7, 2019
I am sitting in our cabin. We spent the day in St. Petersburg, Russia. Before I get there though I need to finish up day 20. As I mentioned above, we were scheduled to get off the boat that 12 o’clock or so. We made our way down to the seventh floor. There we sat with some other people waiting for wheelchair access vehicles. After about 15 minutes we were directed to get off on four. As chance would have it, we were slated to be on the same bus with Gram and Anna, the couple from Australia we met. Anna is in a chair. She is a paraplegic. When we went outside it was about 50° and raining. By time we walked the quarter of a mile or so to where the buses were the sun was out. It was one of those days. Even though there were only two chairs on this van, the guy had troubles with the tiedowns. There were two scooters that were loaded on also. These people manage to walk to their seats but there scooters needed to be tied down behind us. Needless to say, we were all jammed in this little van. I wasn’t so worried about the tiedowns because I was wedged in so tightly. This means that it took extra long to get us in the van initially. He did finally get it situated and we are on our way. It was a driving tour and that’s exactly what it was. We drove around and through Tallinn for about an hour. Because of the position of the van with the chairs and everything it was difficult for Mary to take pictures of the windows. It was similar to Rome and that we drove by things that 10 to 20 miles an hour as they were pointed out. The tour guide was a very animated lady. She tried to be funny and in some cases she was. She had a flaky microphone and half of the things she said no one could hear. She tried to talk more loudly and closer to the microphone but that didn’t really help. So what this boils down to is she talked for about an hour or more and some people pretended to hear her. I’m sure Mary heard her because Mary’s get good hearing. We drove through several areas – most seem to be residential. They didn’t really seem to be a downtown per se. Estonia has been ruled by just about every surrounding country. They finally gained their own independence after the USSR failed. The tour guide said that they are relying on tourism. I was kind of strange because it really was nothing that comes to mind that I would go out of my way to the capital of Estonia. After driving through the streets for an hour or more we ended up at the top of a hill near a cathedral. It was our one and only picture stop. Unfortunately, the cobblestones up there were a nightmare. They were worse than some of the other cobblestones we have run into. I couldn’t get into the church, so I decided to stay in a sunlit area and watched the people. Mary was able to going to the Cathedral but she was not allowed to take pictures. This did not make her happy. We hung out in this area for about an hour maybe. There were a lot of other people from other tour groups wandering around. As I mentioned, there was very little in this particular town to consider having tour groups visit. This Cathedral, in my opinion, was a longshot at best. Anyway, we got in the van and we drove back towards the ship. It was only a 2 ½ hour tour and that might’ve been an hour too long. We made it to the port where the ship was. As we were coming into the port area I noticed a series of little souvenir shops. The van driver drove us up to the side of the ship and we all got out. Unfortunately, one of the scooters died and had to be manually lifted off the van. I don’t know what this guy was going to do because he relied on that scooter. I feel bad for him. We all got off the van. Because we were early and it was nice out Mary decided to walk back the half mile or so to the souvenir shop I decided to stay outside the ship and push around and play with my camera while she went back. She was able to get there and back in about 45 minutes. I took several pictures and I wandered around and basically did whatever I wanted. I did get yelled at for going to close to the water but oh well. Mary was able to get our magnets. She bought me a T-shirt. After this we made our way back to our room. We had the manage our pictures that we took that day. We do this picture management so we stay ahead of it. What this basically means is moving the pictures from the cameras to the computers and putting them in the appropriate folders and stuff. It was a formal night on the ship so we had to get dressed. Mary put on her pink dress. I already had on my black pants so Mary just put a shirt over my shirt. We added a tie and we were out the door. We brought our last red bottle of wine. Before going to dinner though we stopped at the Explorers Lounge. They were having a lecture on the art museum in St. Petersburg called the Hermitage. The art director was going through some of the paintings that we need to see when we visit the Hermitage. This took about 30 minutes. Hopefully, when we go to the Hermitage will be able to see some of these masters. From the lecture hall we went to two picture taking spots. We made our way to the dining room and were seated in the same area we have eaten dinner the whole ship. I’m not complaining. For my appetizer I wanted the crayfish dish. Somehow I ended up with a pineapple dish. Instead of saying anything I just ate the pineapple which was actually pretty good. Mary had a big salad for her appetizer. For her entrée she ate roasted pork belly. She had never had this before, nor had I. Turns out she really liked it. I had lobster tail and crabcake times two. Our waiter, Meow, asked if I wanted another lobster tail. I said yes. Instead of another lobster tail what she brought me was another entire dinner. I had two lobster tails and two crabcakes and two sets of vegetables. I managed to eat them all. I think we got away without having to pay for the corkage fee on the bottle of wine we brought. That is a mini win. For dessert we both had cherries Jubilee. I’d never had this before and wasn’t sure what to expect. Overall, it was good. We set our goodbyes and managed to work our way to the casino. They had a blackjack tournament going on so Mary and I both tried one time. Neither of us made the board so it was a tried but failed effort. You could spend more money but the chances of getting on the board were slim the nail because the numbers that were already up there were pretty big. You need a lot of luck to get on the board. We then wandered over to the Texas hold ‘em table. There were four people playing so we sat down and played for about 45 minutes. I ended up almost doubling my money. I’m not sure how Mary did. We knew we had a big day coming up so we decided to head home a little early. We were actually both in bed by 10 o’clock which is early for us on this trip. Overall, it was another good day. The visit to Tallinn was okay at best. We can definitely say that we visited Estonia. I’m not sure I’ll ever make it back unless by mistake. We did have quality time on the ship after our trip. We had a good meal. We learned a little bit about a fancy museum. We tried our hand at winning some money and was partially successful. This closes out day 20.