Crossed the border from Estonia into Russia on 27th May - it was a lot less difficult than I had hoped. I at least thought we would be questioned about why we are visiting Russia and maybe searched but no - our bags didn't even get scanned. Met the old man in St Petersburg and went straight out to get food - a task that seemed to be easy that night but near impossible every other. We ended up finding only 3 decent cheap restaurants in the week. Every evening...

Directions to our hostel involved getting on Tram No.2! The roads were being dug up - there were no trams. Took us over an hour and a half to find the hostel and then 10minutes to find the front door - a bit of a building site itself. Once we got settled there though Tallinn is a great place - fantastic little Old Town all within castle walls. Loads of cobbled streets and a huge square. Great for drinking as well - went out with Paul (American met in Riga) o...

We took a day trip over from Tallinn, by ferry, to visit Finland. It is only 3 hours by car ferry, an hour if you are willing to pay for the hydrofoil. A huge city with all the stores that I'm used to so it was good to wander around them for a while. Saw a few of the sights but spent most of the day seeing the lakes and walking along the beach. In the evening just before we were leaving there were hundreds of thousands of people all gathering around a ...

Riga is the place to be, so different from Vilnius - there is loads to do, 3 nights was nowhere near enough to cover it all, in fact we missed out on seeing the main sights of the city. There is a bobsleigh track one hour out of the city that is open to the public - expert drivers take you down the track on ice in winter or on wheels in summer. We made the hour journey there only to find that it is only open on weekends so missed out there - we got to see th...

Only had two nights in Vilnius - good job too because there really isn't all that much to see and not much happens. On checking in at our hostel a voice behind shouted "No Way!" It was Kevin and Eric again - the third time we have seen them now - some kind of stalking going on here! In ilnius there is a castle that is more like a sand castle with about 50 steps right up to the top. According to the lonely planet the number 1 thing to do in the whole of Vilni...