Kiel; Sunday, 13 November, 2016

I had a quick breakfast, checked out of the hotel and put my luggage in a locker at the station before heading off into town to visit a couple of museums in the short time I had left in the city.

First stop of the morning was the former Fish Market and now home to the towns maritime museum for a look round their exhibition on the history of Kiel and the sea including quite a bit on the Kiel ship canal – the busiest in the world, and several good models of the harbour over time.

I had a wander up through the old town, stopping off at the Schloßplatz which is mostly made up of modern buildings (being a major U-Boat harbour Kiel got pretty well flattened during the war), and then on down to the Warleberger Hof to have a look round the Stadtmuseum.

By now I’d pretty much seen everything that I wanted to see in Kiel and decided that rather than hang around in the city I’d take an earlier train back to Hamburg and spend a couple of hours there before heading on out to the airport.

I was glad I made that decision as a little way out from Hamburg the train came to a grinding halt and a series of announcements in German, but pretty much understandable in English, first informed us of a broken-down train ahead of us that they were trying to fix and then, after a fairly long wait, the news that we were being diverted away from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof and across instead to Hamburg-Altona on the opposite side of the city. To get there we had to join the back of a long queue of trains shuttling in and out of the terminus so that took quite a bit of time to.

By the time I’d finally got to Altona I had the choice of putting my bag into a luggage locker and having about 40 minutes to look around the immediate area, of which there isn’t much to see, or just calling it a day, not risking any further disruption, and heading straight out to the airport given that the airport S-Bahn train stops at Altona.

I decided not to risk it and 40 minutes later, three hours before my flight was due to depart, I found myself arriving into the airport station to checkin and spend longer than I had planned enjoying the delights of Hamburg airport.