Tallinn, Estonia to St. Petersburg - August 2, 2015

We left Tallinn under beautiful blue skies and headed for the Estonian/Russian border.

Fellow Rider Marilyn Makepeace is a retired underwater photographer from Santa Barbara, CA

 We made a brief coffee stop.

And at our gas stop we found out that Alain gave our trip mascot the front seat on his bike. Alain Gabriel is a retired French business consultant, and lives in La Rippe, Vaud, Switzerland.

 A short trip through some small towns...

 and we lined up to cross the border into Russia.

 We pulled up to the gate ready to cross...

wondering why this 24 hour hamburger stand was closed.

That's when we found out we were at the wrong spot - we were supposed to be here, a holding lot several miles from the border.  The government did not want long lines of traffic in town, so they have everyone come to this site to get a timed ticket to EXIT Estonia - you have to wait in two lines to get a ticket to wait in line at the border!

At our second line of the day, we had to present our passports and bike documents.  It took about an hour for everyone to get through this line.

While waiting, we started to train the next generation of motorcycle adventure rider.

We got into our third line of the day.  Ate some lunch,

took naps, and generally waited around for another hour and a half.  The guides were doing everything they could to shorten our assigned wait time of 23 hours.  23 HOURS! are you kidding me?!  Well,  whatever they did, we finally got to leave the holding pen a little after 3pm.  That's Boz (California) taking a nap under the close supervision of Randy (New Mexico) and Alain (Switzerland/France).

So back to the gate we motored.  But not so fast...

We had to get back in line (#4 - for those keeping count - just to get out of Estonia)

Finally, we get into the exit border crossing.  Here we had to show our passports and bike title and registration.  The woman - I swear - no joke - spent 30 minutes scrutinizing David's title with a jeweler's lens!

Finally! We got to leave Estonia.  We drove about 100 yards and waited on the bridge over the Narva River in line #6.

These two forts, less than an eighth of  a mile apart, have stood guard over this portion of the river for about 5 centuries.

By the time we finished crossing over into Russia, and spent another hour purchasing insurance for our bikes, it was after 6pm.  We tried to make up for lost time, passing slower traffic...

any way possible!

Fellow rider, Boz, took it all in stride.

As we got closer to St. Petersburg, traffic picked up, as did the number of floors in the awful Soviet-era apartment buildings.

Not sure what the little blue roofed building is, but it looked a little out of place.

Randy looks good on his red R1200 Adventure.

Ayres Adventures' route into St. Petersburg took us by several Soviet monuments.

St. Petersburg is at about the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska, so it stays light until about 10pm.

Between the twilight and clouds, we had dramatic skies as we entered St. Petersburg.

We reached our hotel, Grand Hotel Emerald, a little after 9pm.  It was a very long day.  We had missed the dinner originally planned for us, but our guides quickly arranged for a late meal at the hotel, and treated us to vodka and wine.  We retired as soon as dinner was eaten, as we had a very full day of sightseeing in St. Petersburg lined up for tomorrow.