Leaving for Berlin

Today I really regretted that we had put off making travel arrangements til the last minute. Practically the whole day was spent online looking up flights and trains to try and find the cheapest options. Luckily we HAD already booked our flights to Berlin, but we still needed to find flights to Rome, a hostel there, flights from Rome to Brussels, and flights from Brussels back to Belfast. Another issue was the fact that we will be traveling during Easter. I had no idea Easter was such a big deal over here, but apparently it’s when most schools have their spring breaks and so everybody and his mother is traveling.

At any rate, while Arne scoured the internet for the best deals, I spent the afternoon running errands. Put my signed tax forms in the mail for Dad, bought a few groceries for dinner, and got my hair cut at a place just around the corner from my dorm room.

At 1:30am we left Mount Charles and headed for Europa Bus Station. Hopped on a bus there at 2am for the two-hour drive to Dublin. The bus took us straight to the airport where we waited for another two hours to leave on our flight to Berlin at 6am. By then we were both looking and feeling pretty haggard, with only a couple hours’ sleep between the two of us.

It was still dark in Dublin when we flew out. The plane was on a pretty steep climb, and we were briefly immersed in the swirling greyness of the clouds. The 747 burst from the thick layer of clouds and continued its climb. The clouds looked at first like a stretched-out, perfect layer of light blue cotton candy, but as the plane continued to climb, the cotton candy became wispy and broken in some places. At that point my vision completely changed. The clouds became glaciers covering the planet, making peaks here and there, broken apart in other places.

As I continued to gaze out the window, I noticed a thin line of pink in the distance. It began to grow, and blossomed into a bright golden color—we were flying into the sunrise.