Foreign Perspectives

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After much consideration of the flights from Girona (or is it Gerona?) and Barcelona, it looks like Berlin has won for October.

All being well, we’ll be heading off towards the end of October for three or four days. I thought that the hotel prices would blow Berlin out of the water but there are lots of good quality accommodation at quite reasonable prices. Haven’t totally settled on a hotel/apartment but we’re aiming for somewhere in the Mitte area (ie central Berlin) which appears to offer the chance to walk around all the major sights over the course of a few days.

We’re planning on booking that sometime in the next few days once we nail down the accommodation. Flights look deadon as they leave Barcelona in the afternoon and get back in the evening.

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ADA have been after me for quite a while now to add their logo to my sites, so here it is.

As you know, we’ve been renting a far from them since our own was wrecked by a tractor way back at the end of May. In that we’re quite a good customer for them you’d think that we would be due some brownie points for that, wouldn’t you?

Well, we’ve been renting the car for so long that they need it back as they’ve to return it to the leasing company and we agreed to make the changeover today.

We’d arranged to change it over at the airport as the town centre location is a bit of a nightmare to get in and out of plus it doesn’t have terribly long working hours.

Anyway, we dropped James off at school and off we went to the airport.

First off, we were going to have to pay for all the damage to the car. Kind of peculiar seeing as it was already damaged when we picked it up, eh?

Next he said he had a little two seater car for us. Yes, a car smaller than we had ordered and useless to us as we need at least a four seater. So, whereas other car hire firms would have been upgrading our car after such a long rental, ADA were going to make quite a downgrade.

Finally, he said he’d to do an authorisation on our card for another EUR 600. Now, that wouldn’t matter too much with a UK credit card but a French debit card it does. In particular it means that EUR 1200 would have been blocked in our account and in fact we’d not have been able to extend the car rental next week as planned.

Nope, he couldn’t do anything about any of that.

So, we’re sans-voiture. We’re also down EUR 70 as we needed to get a taxi to the school to collect James.

Next time, if there is one, I’ll tell them to collect the car if they want it because we certainly aren’t going to be helpful to them when there is zero service in response.

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Being born at the end of August wasn’t great timing when we were in the accommodation business so, as usual, John’s birthday yesterday was quite hectic and not helped at all by being the first day back to school for James.

School days here have very awkward times if you’re working and need to travel around. Anyway, after dropping off James at 9am, it was off to pick up some presents for John (so far the favourite is a toss-up between the bike and a train set) by which time it was time to race back for James at noon. We dropped him off at 2pm and then it was off again to see about getting a birthday cake which at least let us get back for James at a relatively leisurely pace.

For the evening, the highlight was the meal at the pirate restaurant which was a big hit with the kids as you can see.

Anyway, tomorrow it’s back to the slog of catching up with the admin that just didn’t get done over the Summer…

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