Help

Ah the excitement of travel through Eastern Europe. Our original plan was to take a train from Prague to Tallinn, Estonia… until we found that there really aren’t any trains that run through the Baltics. At least not with any regularity and not conveniently connected.

The next option was to take a bus, but under the best of circumstances it’s more than a 24 hour bus ride and that just wasn’t too tempting.

Flying is always a possibility, but such a dull one.

Which is why we’ll be taking a train from Prague to Rostock, Germany and then catching a ferry from Rostock to Helsinki, Finland. It’s a 24-hour ferry ride, but we have sleeping quarters, so we’re all set. We get into Helsinki at 8 in the morning, and it’s only a 2 hour ferry ride from there to Tallinn, so we decided to give ourselves am 8-hour stopover in Helsinki – because how often does one unexpectedly find themselves in Finland?

So, anyone have any knowledge of Helsinki? It will be a Sunday morning/afternoon that we stay there – the 22nd of November to be exact. We’re expecting to just wander around the downtown and see what there is to see, but if anyone has any hot tips (other than “bundle up”) we’d love to hear them.

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UPDATE: I think we´re set for Berlin. Through our good friends at Rabers in San Jose, we were put in touch with a vintage moto enthusiast (and Rabers customer) living in Berlin. Assuming everything works out, we should be staying with him. Thanks to everyone for their help!

We weren’t originally planning on going through Berlin, but more than a few people have suggested that we make it a stop. We don’t currently have any connections in Berlin, so we thought we’d see if anyone is in Berlin, or might have a friend who’d be willing to let us stay for a day or two.

Right now, if we were to visit Berlin, it would probably be from November 12th to November 15th, but that’s definitely flexible.

So far we’ve stayed with friends-of-friends in London and Paris and things went fantastically. We’d be more than happy to provide references if that would help.

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I’m sure that we’re going to visit a number of pretty well known tourist destinations – just because a lot of people visit the Taj Mahal, doesn’t mean it’s not amazing – however, we’re also hoping to find lesser known or personally interesting stops along the way. Like a 600 year old Irish Monastery on a rocky little island or a museum of soviet era video games.

As we started researching where to go and what to do, we kept finding great ideas and writing them down, but didn’t really have any idea of where they actually were in relation to one another. So we created a Google Map of points of interest. We won’t see all of these, and we’ll see other things that don’t make it on the map, but here’s a bunch of things we’ve found that seem worth checking out.

Have any other suggestions? Please let us know!

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So we haven’t even left the country yet and we’ve run into our first speed bump. The Russian Visa has been significantly delayed in processing and as it looks right now we’re going to have to delay our flight from Chicago to Ireland (you have to mail off your passport to get a Russian Visa – so we can’t leave the country until we get the Visa approved and our passports returned).

We currently have accomodation in Chicago through Wednesday, August 26th, but we may need to stay in the area for a few extra days (so Thursday night onward).  Anyone have any friends or family in the area that wouldn’t mind us potentially staying for a night or two?

We can also tap into Couch Surfing to bridge a gap of a day or two, so even if someone would only be able to house us for a night, that might help. Feel free to send anyone the link to our “About Us” or “Invite Us” pages for a little information about what we’re doing and why we would be fantastic house guests.

And please don’t post anyone’s contact information in the comments section. Send us an email with any suggestions or contacts.

THANKS!

[UPDATE 8.22.09]
We’ve gotten several offers for places to stay in Chicago, so it looks like we should be set. We haven’t sent out reply emails yet, but will shortly. Anyway, thanks to everyone who offered to help!

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