Leaving Vancouver

I am writing this on Sept 7 because if I had tried to do it yesterday it would have been complete gibberish!

No matter how I tried, there was just no sleeping, although it was hard to keep my eyes open so at times I had to shut them just give them a rest. We had about 90 minutes to make our way through Reykjavik airport which was jammed with travellers at 6 am all making their various connections. Then another 3 hours and we were in Berlin where we enjoyed a super strong americano to help us get thru the next stage of our adventure…navigating the public transport system to our VRBO apartment.

Fortunately, we had experience using the kiosks to buy train tickets on our previous trips so that was easy. It was finding the correct platform to catch the train…luckily most people speak English so I quickly got the info…then I noticed the escalator down to the tracks was broken….aaaargh! The wheeled baggage doesn’t do stairs very well!

I had downloaded the Berlin transportation app at home and it works great as it picks up your location using gps, so we arrived at our stop (including a train change) with no problems. From there it was about a 600 metre walk to our apartment…(gotta love those wheeled bags on cobblestones! Whose idea was that anyway?)

When we arrived at the apartment building we realized our mistake! It was 8 flights of stairs to the 4th floor apartment! Weight lifting was never so much fun! My 35 pound bag became monumental! Did I mention that the temperature here in Berlin is a balmy 30C? The cleaning staff showed up just as we were struggling to open the door with the key from the lock box, fortunately, because we couldn’t open the (trick) door. We bailed back down to the street to find and then sit in the shade with a very cold mineral water while we waited for the room to be cleaned.

Once we settled in we decided that it was a lovely oasis in a quiet neighborhood (in the former East Berlin). Someone had left us dinner in the freezer…salmon fillets and cauliflower rice! Along with a very tasty ‘all natural’ German beer and some soda water we were soon fed, watered and ready to pass out from exhaustion! Which we did!