Stade; Sunday, 21 December, 2025

I didn’t have much time before I needed to start heading back into Hamburg to make my flight, so I had a relatively early start and a quick breakfast before heading out of the hotel to do a repeat of the circuit of the city fortifications, though this time it was in just cloudy weather which meant that I was able to see a lot more than I had done the previous day, including the rather dramatic skyline of the city’s church spires reflecting in the large Holzhafen inside the Burggraben – something that had been totally invisible the previous day.

In the end it took about 2 hours to do a repeat of the circuit with actually being able to take photos of things rather than just into the mists, and once completed I headed back to the hotel where I still had time to download all the photos off of my camera and pack up before I needed to check out.

After checking out of the hotel I headed over to the Christmas Markets to pick up a final couple of little gifts and then slowly made my way back over to the station to pick up the train back into Hamburg.

I had a pretty smooth connection in Hamburg back out to the airport and in the end it turned out that I’d left way too much time as the journey through the airport was very smooth and I was sat in the lounge a good three hours prior to the departure time of my flight, and with passport control being significantly more efficient on exit than on entry (and an order of magnitude better than Frankfurt the previous week), I had quite a lot of time to kill before my flight back to London.