On the plane to St Petersburg.....

So- we ended our time in Berlin with a day at the Wannsee, seated in a rented cabana along with 10,000 Germans. Actually, we had the cabana to ourselves but the sand and water were covered with locals. The day was very pleasant- not quite as hot as before but still warm enough that we had to venture into the murky waters on occasion. We even celebrated our German heritage and our last day in Berlin with a Rostwiener with (what else?) German potato salad. And beer, of course. A quick trip by S-Bahn back to town and we had time to pack, meet with the property manager to get our euros back (still waiting for the French euro deposit to show up in our PayPal account: Zut!) and go to a nice restaurant for dinner- Italian.

We weren't particularly sad to say goodbye to the condo, so we were up at 5:00AM and caught an early morning taxi to Tegel airport. As we were checking in at LOT in Berlin the young, slightly snippy agent couldn't find us, kept asking if we had a paper ticket, and finally told us that we were off a day- we were booked to fly to Warsaw on Thursday. I produced our itin and she glanced at it, said she'd just put us on that day's flight but that "our travel agent had made the mistake". I again reminded her that I had a printout of the itin and that no- we did have the correct day.......and when we finally boarded the plane- surprise!!! we had the same exact seats Rose had booked for us even though the plane was full! Imagine! Changing travel days to a full plane and getting your same booked seats! How stupid did she think we are? But before we could board, we had to wait for the plane to arrive, and there we sat and watched the clock tick along- past our "departure time" and into the next hour. This,in spite of the fact that the board never changed our flight time, and in fact cheerfully announced "boarding" at the assigned time, all the while as we sat and waited. This was enough fun for us, early in the morning, when it finally dawned on us that leaving late meant........arriving late.....which meant....uh oh. Missed our connection from Warsaw to St Petersburg. We finally arrived in Warsaw and spent an hour with the "transfer info people" it was obvious that they was expecting us....said that they were all amazed that Berlin LOT allowed us to board a very late plane, knowing that we would miss the only connection to St Pete when there was another DIRECT flight to Russia that they could/should have put us on when the departure was delayed. So to summarize our travel experiences in Germany- our train from Sarrebrucken was so late we missed our connection in Mannheim and our plane from Berlin was so late we missed the flight to Poland. Glad to be moving on! Next- Russia!