After arriving from Vilnius yesterday, I had a good night’s sleep at the Clarion Collection Hotel Valdemars. We had a nice breakfast and checked-out. Leaving our bags at the front desk at the hotel, we headed out to take in Riga.
We walked to the St. Peter’s Church to join the Old Riga Free Walking Tour 🔗 at 10:00 AM and then the Alternative Riga Free Tour 🔗 at 12:30 PM.
Between the tours we saw the Bremen Town Musicians sculpture at St. Peter’s Church; if you can touch all four of the animals, it is supposed to bring you good luck (something which would be much needed later in the day). Both the tours were back to back and we didn’t really have time to plan lunch in between.
After the tours we walked back to the hotel, picked up our backpacks and headed to the bus station right away. We reached with some time to spare and decided to get something to eat and wait there for our bus to Tallinn.
Somehow we got confused about the timing and thought our bus was at 4:30 PM; we were waiting inside as the bus we were booked on left on time at 4:00 PM. I felt terrible, I hadn’t really missed a bus or train or plane till now and this was a first for me. I started wondering how I let this happen, but that was not the time to introspect. We had to get to Tallinn as early as we could because we were booked on the Viking Line ferry to Helsinki at 10:15 PM. With the earlier plan, we would have got there by 8:30 PM , picked up some dinner and then taken the ferry. Now all of it seemed to be at risk. Luckily for us there was another LuxExpress service from Riga to Tallinn at 5:00 PM and there were seats available for us to book again. Assuming there were no delays en route, we would reach Tallinn around 9:30 PM and then we still had to make it from the Tallinn bus station to the ferry terminal for check-in for our ferry at least 45 minutes before the 10:15 PM departure. It was all going to be very tight. Our bus ride was smooth and uneventful though I couldn’t really relax knowing what was ahead; I was quiet and tense. As we got close to Tallinn my anxiety increased, counting minutes and kilometres as we moved. As soon as the bus stopped at the Tallinn bus station, we jumped out and ran to the taxi stand to get a cab to the ferry terminal. As we drove through Tallinn, One & One by Robert Miles started playing on car radio; I was listening to this song again after almost 20 years. I spontaneously started humming along, probably subconsciously I had realized that we were very likely to make it, and had allowed myself to relax a little. We just got to the ferry terminal just in time and were able to use the self-service kiosks to check-in. Only after boarding the ferry was I finally able to breathe a sigh of relief; it was indeed good luck that inspite of missing the bus at Riga, everything still fell into place and we were on our way to Helsinki as planned. We made our way to one of the food outlets and found ourselves a table. We were hungry and quickly ordered a tried and tested option for dinner: a burger with fries and salad. We reached Helsinki a little after midnight and thus concluded the nice weekend in the Baltics.
