Country: Estonia
Distance travelled:
Weather: Sunny

I don’t seem to have Marks’ knack of sleeping in much past about 8am and was up at my regular time taking advantage of the site water supply by showering. It is good to not have to turn the heating on before having a shower. The warmer weather will save us on gas for the heater but will probably balance out with the fridge needing to work harder.

With a bit of round-about work, we managed to get hold of Dad and Pam via skype and spent an hour and a half chatting to them about their caravan and their impending trip to Europe. Eventually we felt we had better check out of the camp site before we were charged for another night so we packed up, filled the fresh water tank, drained the grey and located the sewerage point in the nearby marina fuel station. A supermarket visit was both an entertainment and a relief as we puzzled out a new language and discovered that many staples were considerably cheaper, especially meat.

New to our experience was a milk vending machine. We have read that these exist in Italy but didn’t expect to find them further north. I’m not sure they are very popular here either since we were the only people using it (and the only people photographing it) and most shoppers seemed to be buying their piim (milk) in a bag. Weird. I also found stroopwaffels! Awesome, I had run out somewhere in Norway and had missed the daily caramel hit with my morning coffee.

Another shopping expedition led us to a shop something like a Bunnings, a hardware store back home, far better than any equivalent we had found in Britian. Mark is on the hunt for some dry car wash and we found some although he had to peel the Estonian text label off to reveal English before we could be sure.

We were headed toward Keila-Joa waterfall, to the west of Tallinn when the GPS had some kind of spasm and crashed. Repeatedly. Fortunately our road atlas shows its approximate location and as we drew closer, the signage narrowed the direction down. We parked in a quite empty carpark while everyone else seemed to want to park on the verge and down side roads and a prominent sign suggested a parking fee was applicable but I couldn’t find a ticket machine and there were no tickets displayed in the few other cars nearby. Eventually I walked over to the kiosk selling ice creams and drinks and spoke to the lady there. This was the place, she took my money, handed me a small receipt and wrote the van rego down in her notebook. Seemed a questionable way to do it, I thought.

After we had eaten lunch, we walked over to the waterfall, a decent fall on a slow moving river with a wide stretch of rock people kept wading across. Like a lot of rivers and waterfalls we have visited in Europe, this one was set up with a hydroelectric turbine, quite a subtle installation that didn’t seem to detract from the falls themselves.

The other waterfall we planned to visit was back on the east side of Tallinn, from there we planned to keep heading further east to Lahemaa National Park but as we drove along the GPS crashed repeatedly again and we missed the turn off the motorway to the Jägala Waterfall. It was getting a little late and neither of us felt any enthusiasm to track it down so we continued on, deciding to check out a possible parking spot from Autoroute. Unfortunately this turned out to be too close to a residential area and at some time recently a large No Motorhome sign had been erected.

The winding coastal road beckoned, you never know what you might find. We eventually found the Vergi Marina just on dinner time. We ate and then made quick use of their wifi network to locate a campsite I had read about on another blog. This led us to the Estonian National Parks website which has an absolutely awesome search function to help in locating campsites in whatever area of Estonia you might be visiting.

Half an hour or so driving, the last stretch down an incredibly potholed dirt track, and we were on the coast. Another motorhome was there as well as a few tents with their ropes held down with large rocks. Just as we pulled up the sun slipped below the horizon leaving a faint line of colour. We had caught glimpses of it as we drove and were sorry to have missed the sunset as it would have been the best we have seen so far this trip.

With dinner already eaten and all the cleanup done back at Vergi Marina, there was nothing needed taken care of so we snuggled down in bed to watch a movie and then sleep.