Having spent the morning pottering around, writing, posting off eBay buyers purchases and prepping the garden to survive our absence Dawn and I are waiting for friends to arrive to take us all to Manchester Airport for our flight to Berlin. I can’t quite believe that after 2 years and one aborted attempt (thanks Covid) the five of us are finally on our way. Sadly sans the 6th Musketeer – Tony Allen – who passed away last year. Still, we’ll sink a few in his memory…

I’ll blog about our journey as and when I can…

15:15.

We’re on our way…

15:42.

Oh, the joys of the ‘cobbled motorway’ (aka the M62)…

16:29.

We’re using a car drop-off place on the Styal Rd, just South of the airport railway delta junction. It’s a great use of acres of disused greenhouses as all the vehicles are kept undercover. Now we’re on the bus to take us to the terminal.

17:30.

Oh, the fun of Manchester Airport and Ryanair check in. The self bag drop is farcical. Half the label printing machines are broken. When you do get your bag labelled you join another queue to drop off your bag. But there’s only one person doing it. Then the belt’s broken! So we’ve been standing here for nearly an hour! My friends have found a way of passing the time..

1950.

We’re late, fed up of queuing and haven’t had a drink, but at least we’re on the plane…

Saturday morning update…

Our plane was an hour late into the Brandenburg airport but I can’t fault the flight crew, who were a mix of Spanish and Italian. They were lovely. Getting through the airport was a breeze as (unlike Manchester) everything works. Even the immigration staff were friendly although I’ll never get used to our loss of freedom and our new 3rd country status (thanks for nothing Brexiters). As we were arriving so late we’d arranged for a taxi pickup for the half-hour trip to our hotel near Alexanderplatz. We checked in with just 20 nins left before the bar closed at 1AM so headed straight to it before going to our rooms. Once again the staff were lovely and also flexible so we managed to squeeze two rounds in before they shut up shop and we retired to bed at 02:00.

Tomorrow’s a new day…