Jeez, it's been a while.

I've been ok, busy at work and lazy at home, hence the lack of blogging. I've been keeping an eye out, but not commenting much.

We had a lovely weekend last week with Nick, Mrs F and Mr S. They blogged all about it, so I won't repeat it, but I had a lovely weekend, and it was over far too quickly. The bank holiday was rounded off with a barbecue at our friends' house, followed by a mammoth WoW session (four of us in one room! how sad is that?!).

And so now for the excitedness! We're off to Berlin tomorrow!

We have been planning it for ages, but we didn't book our tickets until Thursday, and I've only just received hotel confirmation! Talk about cutting it fine...!

It's actually been pretty stressful. We couldn't book the flights when we wanted to because we didn't have a suitable card to book flights with Ryanair. So we applied for a suitable card, only to find out that it wasn't suitable. So we switched to a different bank who provide a suitable card, which arrived three weeks ago, but there was no money in that account to pay for the tickets. We paid a cheque in to cover the amount, and waited for it to clear. And waited some more. And then on the Thursday, it was supposed to have cleared but noooo it hadn't, I phoned up and asked what was going on, and was told they would call me back and let me know as soon as they found out.

I went to the Ryanair site to make sure the flights were still available, and found out the price had gone up by €30 since I last looked, bit of a bastard but what can you do, we should have booked earlier.

The bank sorted out the cheque, I went to book the tickets, put my card details in, and it bollocksed up. I put them in again, still no good. As I was entering them the third time, I noticed that my name is spelled incorrectly on the card, and I think that's why it wasn't working. So, I started again and used Landers' card details instead. Imagine my horror when I saw that the tickets where now another €40 more expensive! I think they had sort of reserved the tickets before, even though I hadn't been able to pay for them, and now they had two less tickets to sell so the website automatically puts the price up! I tried to call them to sort it out, but it just rang out forever so I gave up. Annoying, but that's Ryanair for you.

Yes, Ryanair are cheap if you get tickets at the right time, but the downside of that is the customer service if anything goes wrong. They cut costs everywhere.

It is nice if you only take hand luggage though. I have already checked us in online, no messing about at the airport, and no waiting for luggage at the other end - marvellous!

So, last night we decided where to stay (with Rampage's help I'd narrowed it down to a few places) and we've booked into a floating hostel! It's a boat on the Spree, right in the city centre as far as I can make out. We're staying with Rampage for a couple of nights, but we didn't want to impose too much. Boaty goodness FTW!

Our flight is at 6am on Sunday morning, we have to be at Dublin airport for like 4:30, and we're driving there, so we stayed up late last night, watched a couple of films - Saw 4 (gross) and Stardust (amazing and beautiful and funny and soppy) - and got up at around 7am. The reasoning behind this madness is that we'll be tired this afternoon, we can go and have a nap, and we'll wake up this evening, drop the dogs off at our friends' house, and we'll be OK for the drive to Dublin. We might have to have an early night on Sunday but that'll probably be for the best since we're meeting Meno on Monday and we'll need all the energy we can get by all accounts!

We're packed, camera batteries are charging, iPod playlists are updated, I've got a bit of housework to do so we don't come back to a total bombsite, maybe a quick WoW session, and then bed for a few hours.

Berlin, here we come!