Thursday July 2nd we took the bus to Tallin, Estonia. It was a 4 hour 15 minute ride, and the seats on the Lux Express buses were comfortable enough, plenty of leg room and a free coffee machine on board. We chose the bus for these two legs of our trip because the Baltics are still trying to improve their rail travel, there is a train that goes between the three main cities but it is infrequent and slower than the bus. They have been working on a project to build a high speed train from Tallin to Riga to Vilnius, since before Covid, then put on hold, then they lost funding for it. Hopefully it’ll get done sometime soon, because that would make it so much more convenient for people to travel between the three capitals of the Baltics.
Back to our day. We ordered a Bolt to get from the bus station to our Airbnb, and unfortunately the first one that arrived couldn’t fit our luggage in the trunk of his car, so we had to find another one, and decided just to get a taxi since they were sitting there, a costly mistake. I had to pay a cancellation fee for the Bolt driver, then the taxi was triple the price of the Bolt! We grabbed our key from a hotel around the corner then were able to get into our Airbnb, we had two long flights of stairs (50 in total) to climb up to our apartment, which once again did not have AC. We opened the windows that looked out onto a beautiful church and cobblestone streets on one side, and part of the castle wall and turret on the other side. We were right smack in the middle of Old Town, so that was nice. Our apartment was an old building with modern amenities, which was nice. We had two full bathrooms in this one!
We ventured out into Old Town to walk around and check things out, we ended up grabbing dinner at a German restaurant with outdoor seating. Walked around more afterwards but didn’t really do much this evening. 


Friday July 3rd, I unfortunately didn’t have any plans for what to do here in Tallin, so we ended up splitting up. Paul really wanted to go to the Maritime museum, but Braydon and I didn’t have much interest in that, so we found some tunnels that we were going to explore. Paul and Kyle loved the maritime museum, which they said was quite interactive with really cool exhibits. Braydon and I explored the Bastion Tunnels which were under the city and originally they were built back in the 1600’s by the Swedish leader, but over the years they have been home to many things; a bomb/gas shelter during the wars, storage/hiding area for smuggled goods during prohibition, a homeless refuge, a Steampunk gathering space, and for many years completely flooded. They’ve only been a museum and open to the public since 2004. They were dark and creepy with a few model relics or wax figures to showcase what was there, plus a few tv screens with videos you could watch. We enjoyed walking through these cool tunnels. 
Afterwards we all met up at a market hall called Balti Jamma Turg which is a produce market, a food hall and an antique thrift hall of sorts. It was raining pretty hard outside so we ended up getting food and walking this market for a while. Once the rain lifted enough for us to walk back to our place, we did and then just were lazy the rest of the day. We did go out for dinner, but we couldn’t decide on what to eat, and we were all a little tired of the Baltic food, it seemed like every menu had the same things on it, so we opted for Indian food again. We found this cute old restaurant where we played cards and enjoyed our curries and masalas. 


Saturday July 4th, America’s 250th birthday celebration and we had no plans. Paul found an open air museum on the water about a half mile bus ride north, so we went there, it was a nice little museum showcasing how an old seaside village would have looked like. They were having a kids birthday party while we were there, so it was cute watching the kids play tug of war and blow bubbles, and run around on the grass areas. They had these unique swings that the 4 of us went on together, which was a lot of fun. The museum didn’t take us long to walk around so we spent a good bit of time walking/sitting on the big rocks on the shore of the Gulf of Tallinn, which leads out to the Baltic Sea. Kyle was having fun attempting to skip rocks. It was gorgeous weather, cool air, sun shining, sea sparkling. We had lunch right next door to the open air museum, the only other place out in this area, the restaurant was supposed to look like an upside down boat. We sat outside looking at the water and enjoyed some lunch and cards of course. We kept it lazy and chill until the next bus came and we went back to Tallinn. All three boys fell asleep on the bus so I made an executive decision that we were going to skip past our bus stop and go check out another area of Tallinn that I had wanted to see, called Telliskivi Creative City. The three boys were a little baffled when I woke them to get off the stop and they looked around like where are we. Ha! The area was really cool and had neat outdoor spaces with tons of shops and restaurants and graffiti murals on the walls, corn hole and slack lines and little playground for the kids, bocci ball court, etc. It was a really neat area and I’m glad we got to see it, although everyone was a bit tired and the rain had come back, so we headed back the the apartment to pack up.


Sunday July 5th, we packed up our stuff and returned the key, grabbed a Bolt to the ferry, since it was raining steadily. We had tickets for the 10:30 ferry to Helsinki, it says to get there 30 minutes in advance, so we just made it to check in right at 9:52, and the kiosk says we have 8 minutes until boarding closes, so we huffed it through the terminal to board our ship. We checked our luggage and then went to find seats, this ferry was massive! Lots of different areas, with casino like machines, bar, restaurants, cafeteria, sun deck, lounges, kids playground, you name it! After we checked in at the kiosk, no one actually looked at our tickets and we had different options of hallways to go and ships to board, so when we started moving at 10:15 and backed out of the ferry terminal, Paul and I were a little concerned we were on the wrong ship, because what big ferry like this leaves 15 minutes early?! But we were fine, it was the right ship. But then another worry set in and we spent the rest of the ferry trip trying to figure out our plane tickets for the next day. We had a 6 AM flight out of Helsinki the next day to Munich, then a direct flight from Munich to Charlotte, but we were only allowed to check in for the Munich to Charlotte leg of the trip. So we did online chats with both United (whom we booked the tickets with) and Lufthansa, the airline we were actually flying. Lufthansa said our tickets had been removed and she didn’t know why, we had to contact United. United said we were fine, we just had to check in at the gate to get our seats. Anyway, this took up the entire 2 hour ferry ride. When we arrived to Helsinki, it was still raining. We left our luggage at a Luggage Hero-which ended up being an Indian restaurant. Then we didn’t know what to do since it was raining heavily. The boys ended up shopping and wandering through a mall, while Paul and I opted for a small boat cruise around the Helsinki archipelago. He and I had to run through the rain, avoiding massively flooded streets (which apparently is common for Helsinki) and got to the boat cruise a minute or two after it was supposed to leave, but luckily we were able to buy tickets and get on the boat. They probably waited a few extra minutes because the boat was only ¼ full. Which was quite nice for us, because they had a covered section down below where Paul and I spread out our wet stuff on a table for 6, then were able to go up on the sun deck in between rain showers to take in the view better. It was a nice little boat ride, 1 ½ hours long, learning a little bit about the islands as we went.
Afterwards we went to find the boys at the mall, they were napping in a coffee house! We grabbed some dinner and the a Bolt ride to the airport. This is when our travel hell started. 
We get to the airport to check in our bags for our early morning flight, and we are not on the flight and it’s sold out. Lufthansa can’t do anything about it, we have to call United. We walked to our hotel that’s connected to the airport and Paul spent the next 2 hours on hold and then arguing with a United Airlines representative. She finally put us on a flight from Helsinki to Frankfurt to DC to Charlotte. But we do not have seats on the long haul flight from Frankfurt to DC, we apparently have to get those at the gate. So we are stressed because we don’t know if we are actually on this flight, the boarding passes say waitlisted. We all got only a couple hours of sleep that night before we were walking back to the terminal at 4:40 AM, check in our bags and they can’t tell us anything about our 2nd flight, we have to wait for the gate agent for that flight in Frankfurt. When we get there, not only did they unload the plane on the tarmac and we had to take a bus to the gate, which took forever, I don’t know if this is normal in Frankfurt or what but there were so many buses trying to drop off at the same place, we had to snake around this parking garage it seemed for a long time. And we still can’t get anywhere with seats, Paul spent another 1-2 hours on the phone with United where they claim we are confirmed on the flight, Paul kept telling them that our boarding passes say waitlisted, we can see the stand by list and we are numbers 9-12 on that list! The agent ended up hanging up on Paul, so it was a wasted couple of hours, not to mention the money that call cost! Finally about 1 ½ hours before our flight, the gate agents arrive, we were first in line and the last people to get seats and get on the plane-the plane was delayed because of us. I really have no idea what happened in that hour and a half, the lady said we had seats in the premium economy section of the plane that we paid a lot extra for, but after much debate and hundreds of other people being helped all around me, they had sold our seats. We ended up getting 2 premium economy seats, not together, and 2 economy seats. The boys sat in economy and apparently had terrible food, and they had a wall behind them, so limited reclining abilities. They got off the plane starving, but we had a very close connection until our flight to Charlotte and we still had immigration to do. As we are waiting for immigration, we notice Lufthansa never loaded our bags onto the plane in Frankfurt, which of course makes sense since we were the last people to get seats. On the plus side, we didn’t have to wait for our bags and go through customs. We ran to our gate and then our plane was delayed. After an hour or so of waiting they finally boarded the plane, which ended up sitting at the gate with problem after problem. The plane was stifling hot and people were getting unruly. At first they cancelled the route due to weather, then when we were re-routed, a generator was broken, then after maintenance came and fixed it, we backed up the runway, where they cancelled the route again. Finally taking off many hours after our scheduled time, we had a bumpy ride and when we landed all this stuff started flying out of the little galley kitchen in the back of the plane! Water bottles, tray, snacks were flying down the aisle. A little scary, but thankfully no one was hurt. Of course, since we landed very late, Charlotte didn’t have a gate ready for us, so we sat on the runway waiting again. Afterwards we had to go to baggage claim to submit a claim, but luckily there was a phone number we could call, so I took that down instead and headed home! We had been awake and traveling for 24 stressful hours. Needless to say we all crashed in our beds and slept hard that night.