Eindhoven; Monday, 03 November, 2014

With the hotel almost empty, breakfast was a considerably better organised and more pleasant event than the previous day.

After breakfast I checked out and headed back to the station and on into Amsterdam, where I left my bags in the luggage lockers at Centraal station before heading out into the city

The weather forecast for the day wasn’t particularly good, which meant that the open-top tour buses all had their tops on, which appeared to be the best way of spending a couple of hours looking round the city in the dry.

I did two full circuits of the tour, during which the skies absolutely opened – hence staying on to go round a second time.

By the time I got back to Centraal station for the second time the skies were down to a light drizzle, and my time to head to the airport was up, so I collected my luggage and headed out to Schiphol.

Having checked in I watched as over the next hour or so the flight did Southern Railways trick of a creeping delay – getting two or three minutes later every 2-3 minutes, so it’s always an hour away.

Eventually, nearly 90 minutes late we boarded to be told that the delay had been caused by a technical fault on the plane, which given it was exactly the same plane I’d flown out on on Saturday didn’t really fill me with much confidence.

Just over an hour later, and with no further technical problems, we touched back down in Gatwick, where having messed up the start of the journey, and the ends of several previous journeys, Swissport for once redeemed themselves slightly by actually having our bags on the baggage belt as we came through Immigration.