That 15 minute walk to town only took 45 minutes! We’re getting the hang of this touring thing!

Well this is the first cruise that we decided to plan most of our shore excursions and not use Princess’s years of experience and knowledge.  The next photo explains without words how we are doing.  This was taken in Tallinn, Estonia (one of our better days for finding our way around.)

As you can see we all have our own ideas of which direction the center of the city is located!

We had scheduled a walking tour of old town Tallinn and all that we had to do was find the starting point where we were to meet our guide.  Cindy had walking directions printed up with a map and we were set to go.  How come the maps you print up never resemble the way the roads really look?  City street names are good (when you can find them posted somewhere).  Well like I said in the title of this blog entry our 15 to 20 minute walk from the ship took 45 minutes.  We did get to the starting point on time, only because we gave ourselves an hour to get there.

On our way to the meeting point we stumbled on these guys fixing the cobblestone streets.  I always wondered how they did that.

Estonia is one of those countries in Europe that I think was conquered by every other country in Europe.  The Danes, Swedes, Germans and Russians were a few.  The Danes were the first and they built the castle that is the center of the old town.

This is located on one of the walls of the castle.  That is the flag of Denmark and on the left is one of the Danish Knights (Sir Eats A Lot).

The next photo will take some explaining.

Take note of the square holes in the middle of the wall on this photo!  They were used for now get this, pooper shoots!  That’s right, Sir Knight dropped his armored drawers and bombs away.  Hate to live on the outside of the castle!

The next photo is Cindy standing next to one of the original wooden castle doors put there some time in the 1600’s and still works today.

  

On our way out of the city we found the perfect place for the Lewis girls. At least Ray and I thought so.

Our tour was a great one but short since we had to be back on the ship by 12:30.  Our tour guides were nice enough to finish our tour near the port.  They gave us directions for the shortest route back to our ship (which took about 15 minutes) and we arrived right at 12:30 to join the long lines of people getting onto our ship. 

We had great tour guides. Here is a photo of them with the flat ones.  The guides got a kick out of the flat ones when we told them all about Flat John and Flat Mary Ann. One of them excitedly pointed out that Flat John is in Estonia’s flag’s colors – blue, black & white.