Journey: Porvoo – Helsinki – Tallinn (Estonia)
The pups are so funny, they make it very clear that town and city walks are boring. Rather than the usual high speed end of lead pulling we get in forests when they are darting from smell to smell, in towns Jasper and Mabel drag their paws like sulky teenagers. The only saving grace for Mabel being if there is anything remotely sandy to roll in.
And so today they had a walk through the old town and by the river in Porvoo, stopping at the food market for dinner ingredients, and then a drive over to Helsinki. We were all organised…Mark had found parking so none of our usual big city major arguments or road stress. Having parked up near the Olympic stadium my only concern was we hadn’t booked our ferry. Mark had researched, knew the company to use but was happy for me to book it…a dangerous decision. There I was on my phone happily booking then right at the point I press pay I realise I’ve accidentally booked the 1:30pm crossing and it’s 12:30…we have only just arrived in Helsinki and the booking site won’t let us change it. We had to drive straight to the ferry, knowing we were possibly too late to board the 1:30pm ferry, if we caught it we may not be able to change it to the 7:30pm I was meant to book, and could thus end up leaving Helsinki an hour after arriving or lose our ferry money and have to rebook. Honestly I am such a numpty! I decided to be positive while driving and spotted two of my flagged sculptures on the mad dash…so that was something. At check in we explained my mistake and they just changed it…no problem, no charge, and we were able to park up at the terminal and explore the city…what a relief! 😃
I’d created a Google map walking tour of the sights we wanted to see and we managed to see and it’s quite a compact city so we were able to see quite a bit of the city. It’s got a definite cafe/bar culture but it is so expensive you wouldn’t want to do that all the time. The pups met a moomin, listened to buskers at the Esplanade, saw various sculptures, and a couple of the iconic buildings.
We arrived back at the van with plenty of time in case something went wrong so I did my exercises (it’s amazing what you can do in a small space), made dinner and boarded the ferry to Tallinn, Estonia. I’m really excited for this part of the trip and spent the whole 2 hour journey planning this phase. Hopefully got a nice mix of things to explore. We even found a nice camp spot overlooking the harbour and took the dogs for a stroll. Roll on tomorrow 😊
SofaWolves 