Into the West.

We came back from Berlin on Saturday morning and the journey was a bit of a mixed bag. Schonefeld Airport is cramped - it makes Cork look big. The station doesn't have baggage trollies until you get to the exit. Seating is in very short supply. However the security staff were polite and efficient. The flight home was fine - surprisingly its cheaper to buy a fry on the plane (Aer Lingus) than in dear old Cork Airport. After arriving in Cork we were told that the buggy wouldn't be given out at the bottom of the steps (as was usually the case) but would come out on the baggage belt. So off we went and after a while our bag came out but no sign of the buggy. Hmm. we wondered where it was and so did another family waiting for theirs. After a while a fellow passenger came over and suggested we look at Belt 4 as she had some other luggage come out there. Lo and behold the buggy was there. However Cork airport in their wisdom put up very few signs about this and the ones they have are headed "OVERSIZE" and mention buggies in smaller print down the list. Maybe I'm odd but I'd consider oversized to mean such items as pianos, printing presses, roofboxes, tailors dummy but not a bloody buggy. Leaving the arrivals (after that great 180 degree turn) we found that there was still only 1 pay machine working. It seems that Cork Airport still hadn't fixed the machine that was out-of-order on Tuesday morning. We were in the long term and I noticed that the shuttle bus goes from outside the multi-storey carpark - no harm in making the punters walk eh ? I won't go on about the reinforcement bars (rebars) hammered into the ground just beyond the kerb in the carpark - the guy beside me had inadvertently backed into them... By the way Berlin was excellent !