Day 06 - Wed - 08/12/26 - Tallinn, Estonia

 With a projected late arrival of 10am, we were able to sleep in a bit.  After breakfast we had another Jharumy Princess Insider port talk on Helsinki and it was once again pretty good.  

As we approached the port, a pilot boat dropped off our pilot and we sailed into the harbor.  The crew backed the ship into the berth very slowly due to the winds and soon we were secured to the dock.  The Norwegian Sun berthed next to us bow first.  Later the Silver Dawn arrived and was berthed on the other side of the Sun.

Once we were cleared to leave the ship, we joined a long line and scanned off the ship.  We walked the long pier and found the Hop On Hop Off bus and purchased two tickets for a 90 minute ride around the city.  We really meant to purchase tickets for their competitor, but it worked out.  

We did the 90 minute loop which passed by the song festival grounds that Angela sang at 10 years ago.  The loop re-familiarized us with the city and back at stop #1, we had to switch to another bus to ride to stop #2 which made a stop at the upper Old Town.  That way we could tour the upper. Old Town and then tour the lower Old Town.  I downloaded walking maps from GPS My City app, and we used those to establish and walking route.  I highly recommend this APP.  Most major cities in the world are covered. 

We spent the rest of day walking the upper and lower Old Town areas.  It's pretty challenging to walk the cobblestones as there is lots of variation.  Also there were many guided tour groups and it made the streets and alleyways quite crowded.  Lunch was at an ethnic restaurant in the town square.  I had a Siberian dumpling dish while Angela had pork soup dish.  

After lunch we finished our walking tour and decided to walk back to the ship as it was only about a mile.  We could have caught the last HOHO bus at 5:30, but walking seemed to us to be a better idea.  

The evening entertainment was a hypnotist that we've seen a couple of times, so we elected to not see him again.  Instead we did our first load of laundry and we each ate a separate dinner so as to attend to the clothes.  But the real treat was that there was a partial solar eclipse and we were able to watch it from our stateroom as the Norwegian Sun departed just before the eclipse started.  Also, there was coverage on our stateroom TV by NASA.  It was pretty cool to watch TV and also take in the live view using our eclipse glasses.

With the eclipse over, clothes cleaned & dried, and put away, Angela headed down for 2 hours of karaoke, while I caught up with my blog.  We have a short day in Helsinki tomorrow, so I'm going to bed early again.  Our plan for tomorrow is to pretty much duplicate what we've been doing.











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