The lap of Ireland, the Reid’s world tour of Ireland ends tonight when we leave for Berlin – ” Don’t mention the war!” I say to my fellow travellers, any of the wars I , II, and the Cold one.

Breakfast in the hotel is great, I go smaller with baked eggs and chorizo, Genelle and Mark go for the waffle, all are good and the fresh orange juice (probably Spanish) is delicious. The Pembroke is very modern by the standards and age of the establishments we’ve been staying in, a bit of modern is nice for a little while.

Kilkenny Castle is next, beautiful building and gardens, the day looks grey and by the time we’ve got around half of the castle it’s raining. Cats and dogs raining, feckin falling out of the feckin sky as an Irishman would say.

If you’ve seen one castle you’ve seen them all, sound familiar? Soon we’re at the Kilkenny arts and crafts local place in the old stables of the castle over the road, I buy a cap, Genelle buys nothing, is their anything wrong with this story, I’ll let you be the judge.

We walk to St Candice’s Cathedral, built in the 9th century, it’s spectacular, and agin the church yard full of graves old and new.

Checkout of the hotel, the sun comes out for 30 seconds and tea and scones and we’re on our way to Dublin, I’m the pilot for the last leg.

All goes well until we get toDublin airport, and trying to find the rental car drop off is a nightmare, the gps takes us to Departures, so we call on Dr Google maps and after 3 laps of the airport we find it. The air in the car is a little blue and full of Irish f…. words, one corner right at the end of our driving nearly results in my co navigator suffering from whiplash, and I did hear a few words of advice that I won’t repeat.

We can’t check in with the machines, useless f….g things, we have to go to a human as they at least recognise that Mark and I aren’t female and have the same name as the co navigator. Finally in, through the tunnel of no return and as usual my knees set all the bells off, so again I get frisked, and metal detectored, by a mildly funny Irishman, I’m past seeing the humour in it, so I grin and look towards the roof.

The flight is good, and then we land and it turns to shite, we get our passports stamped, head out past the uniformed former Stasi guards looking for our driver. He’s nowhere to be seen, Genelle rings the people, they say his name is Greg and he should be there and we have his number, after a lot of calls and a long wait, Genelle nails him near the Easyjet counter, he’s in. T shirt, jeans also wearing a sour look on his face. The cranky prick wanted us to walk about 500 metres to his car and expected us to find him, he’s obviously done no customer skills training. We make him drive to pick us up, and when he gets there he doesn’t even put the bags in the car, I do, then all the way into our Berlin hotel in Haekerscher Markt he says nothing, then when we arrives he says “this is it”, stays in the car while we unload which Mark does slowly, then I walk slowly in front of the car hoping he might get cranky or at least give me the bird, but no, he sulkily looks at his mobile phone. I feel a very negative TripAdviser report coming on.

The Adina Apartment Hotel Haeckescsher Markt is very nice, the room lovely, and the staff very friendly, a nice change after the cranky Kraut who drove us in.

We explore, very late by now, the market area, cafes still open but now closing, so we find a little super market, buy some goodies for breakfast and hit the sack.

Tomorrow we’re doing an Intrepid Urban Adventures Day walk of Berlin starting at 10 at the Reichstag building.

Ciao for another day from Berlin

Paul