The long-awaited continuation, Sunday:

Camping in a free campsite next to the beach on a Saturday night in Estonia is quite an experience. You may be able to tell from the pictures that the tent isn't very big. In fact, it is rated for 2 people but probably should only ever have 1 in it at a time unless you're stacking (which we weren't!). I could easily touch one end of the tent with the entire sole of my foot and the other with my head, yes, at the same time. Not bad for a 12€ tent I suppose. The other downside to this type of camping arrangement is that there are lots of drinking youngsters and no campground officials. There was loud music pretty much throughout the entire evening and at around 6am this song came on which provoked the partiers to crank up the volume to somewhere between deafening loud & "OMG make it stop!".

We were finally awake and out of the tent by 7:30 and on the road by 8:00, on a mission for food. We passed a few roadsigns on the road back to Pärnu which pointed to food, but with much effort we never actually found a place. Before we knew it (well after 3 hours actually) we were again in Pärnu city center and eating breakfast. The next plan was to head immediately to Tallinn so we could be at the harbor by 5pm to make the 6pm departure.

We fueled the scooters up one last time & started heading out of town around 11:30. We were only riding for a few minutes when Jusu's scooter started acting up again, this time more serious with complete lack of scootability (read: no power). We figured the spark plug would just take a new cleaning and be good to go for awhile, but this wasn't the case. After a bit of inspection it was discovered that the air intake was completely loose from the air filter housing so most likely his scooter was sucking up dust, Estonian & Latvian bugs and whatever else, compounding the problem. He tightened the hose clamp & I went on a mission to find a new spark plug for his scooter.

Problem #1: Very few places in this part of Europe are open on Sundays
Problem #2: His scooter's spark plug is extremely rare and apparently only shows up in stores when the moons is full and Jupiter is in retrograde.

We even tried bribing a 17 year old kid, who I spotted that had the same type of scooter, for his spark plug but he said his mom would not be happy if he sold us his spark plug, even for a ridiculous sum of money. It soon became clear that Jusu wasn't going to be scootering back to Tallinn so we started looking at options.

Scooter on a train: doesn't leave until 5pm, it's too late
Scooter on a bus: The cargo bus has just left and the next on comes, well, nobody knows. The passenger bus driver refuses to put it in the luggage compartment even though it would easily fit and we've promised to drain all liquids and put plastic and a blanket underneath it.
Scooter in a van: Aha! We found a rental van that we could drive to Tallinn.

We went to pick up the van and the driver, who was very nice despite his lack of responsible driving skills, offered to drive us to Tallinn himself since it would be a few days before he could send someone to fetch the van. This was a great opportunity for us to sit back, have a drink and relax for a couple hours on the way to Tallinn. Not only that, but we'd be to the harbor probably an hour early giving us plenty of time.

Picture every stereotype you know about European drivers and their driving habits like high-speed tailgating, driving fast, passing even though there's oncoming traffic, braking late, etc. Now apply those to the guy driving our van. There was more than a few moments on the road between Pärnu & Tallinn where I may have wet myself a little. Despite that I figured this guy knows what he's doing and probably knows how to avoid accidents, so I tried to relax. Then about 10km from the harbor the traffic started picking up and he had a close call with braking at a line of stopped traffic, almost rear-ending the car in front of us.

Two minutes later at the very next stop light, the call was not so close & he smacked the car in front of us pretty hard, and so the car behind us also rearended us. The van was large, we were seatbelted and there was no chance for injury for any of us in the van at the speed we were going. It was fast enough though to bust the radiator of the van so we knew we weren't going any further in this vehicle. We unloaded the scooters about as quickly as we could and Jusu's scooter was running well enough to get us the remaining distance to the harbor, even with plenty of time to spare.

The boat ride back seemed to take an eternity and more than any other time since I've moved to Finland, it really felt like I was going home. All in all this 3 day weekend felt like a week and a half and the walk from where I parked the scooter at home to the front door of the apartment were some of the sweetest steps I've taken in a long time.

To sum it all up, a great time, will remember it for the rest of my life, am definitely glad that we did it but I don't think I would do it again, at least not anytime soon. I think everyone should have an adventure like this at some point in their life.

Friday evening:
Our initial plan, before the mechanical difficulty came, was to take coastal roads west out of Tallinn & follow those all the way to Latvia. Unfortunately, there isn't really an efficient way to follow those roads without having to do a ton of backtracking. Since we were already so far behind schedule, we decided to give up on that idea and instead make sure that we made it to Riga before we ran out of time.

The good compromise seemed to be to head for a city in Estonia called Haapsalu. We took highway 9 all the way there and passed by a lot of really old buildings, most of which are broken down and/or falling apart. Later we would discover dozens of these scattered along our route in Estonia. Once we got to Haapsalu we tried to find some place to eat dinner, but there wasn't much to be found. There was some nice looking old castle where there was a concert or show of some sort, it seemed the entire town's population must have been there. We decided that maybe we weren't so hungry & headed south out of town around 7pm.

Of course I couldn't (and wouldn't want to) document the scores of stops we made to ust stop and have a quick stretch, but we did happen upon a stork and nest, perched atop a power pole. Eventually we'd see half a dozen or so different sights like this, but the first one was magnificent. The bird was much bigger than I would have imagined and the nest was just gigantic. We made another quick stop for a coffee & pastry at Lihula around 9pm,  where the sun was hanging low & orange in the sky, masked by a few thin lines of clouds casting the most perfect colors over the whole sky. Unfortunately there were also a few hundred mosquitoes and while my scootering gear covers me pretty much neck to toe, it leaves lots of unprotected head for mosquitoes' blood-sucking enjoyment. It's not so fun scootering down the road with a helmet on coupled with that unique hellish itch courtesy of mosquitoes.

Upon leaving from the coffee joint we decided to try to make it to Pärnu before quitting the day. Once it gets dark, riding on the scooters becomes much less fun for me, whose scooter's headlight is about as worthless for seeing any distance as a tea light candle. We made it into Pärnu around 10:30 and found a Best Western hotel that looked especially inviting considering the day we had. We chained up our scooters to the bike rack in front of the hotel & went upstairs to trash the room. The view from the balcony was pretty nice & it was clear that the place probably looked a lot nicer at night than it would in the daytime. To some extent this was true, but we didn't have time for that now, we were badly in need of a drink and after a quick refreshing shower (separate showers, get your mind out of the gutter) we headed over to the Lime Lounge for the best tasting beer I've ever had. I'm pretty sure even Pabst Blue Ribbon or Milwaukee's Best would have even tasted like sweet nectar at that point, though A. Le Coq does have a decent reputation for quality.

It was around 1:30am when we were heading back to the hotel and probably within another hour after that we were asleep.

Saturday continues in part 3

For a few months my good friend & co-worker have been talking about how cool it would be to buy a couple scooters and take a long trip somewhere, so we made the purchases & started planning our destination. I bought a 2001 Yamaha Aerox. I haven't taken any pictures of my actual scooter yet but it looks like the one below.

Originally we planned to to head to the northern most part of Finland, cross straight north into Norway and continue on to the Barentz Sea. During the summer there would be 24 hours of sunshine and nothing but water between us & the north pole (oh yeah, and about 18 zillion mosquitoes). We had a couple options to make this happen. The first would be to ride the scooters all the way there but that would mean we'd need a week at least to do it, and our aim was to take a long weekend. Option two is transport the scooters and ourselves by train to Oulu or Rovaniemi which would take care of the time problem, but that brought up a new problem. Bicycles are free but cars cost about 85 euros to transport by train to those places. We thought that scooters would fall somewhere in between those two prices but it turns out the train company charges the same price for scooters as they do for cars. 175 euros each for the trip was too much.

The second trip idea was to ferry the scooters to Stockholm and then ride to Oslo. This is also a little time consuming since the boat ride each way is an overnight trip.

We ended up deciding on not-quite-as-fun-but-still-has-the-cool-factor option 3. Tomorrow morning we ride ourselves to the harbor in Helsinki & take a 2 hour ferry ride to Tallinn, Estonia. From there we plan to head west from the city & ride along the sea and see how far we get. We figure we should be able to make it all the way to Riga in Latvia, but it depends a lot on our pace & if we get robbed/hijacked/killed along the way. We're going in true nomad style complete with backpacks, tents & sleeping bags so we'll probably make camp somewhere off the beaten path Friday & Saturday night. Our aim is to make it back to catch the Tallinn-Helsinki ferry Sunday evening at 6:30. If all goes well the scooters won't break down, we won't get robbed/hijacked/killed and we will reach our goal of making it to Riga & still making it back to Tallinn in time to come home.