Hamburg; Friday, 20 September, 2019

Throughout the afternoon I’d had a series of texts from easyJet telling me that my flight was going to be delayed and checking online showed that this delay was increasing as each hour went by.

It did mean, though, that I didn’t need to rush for a train down to Gatwick as my 90 minutes between finishing work and departure slowly extended out to a full three hours. I caught a train later than I’d originally planned, and despite my best efforts still ended up with nearly 2 hours to spare at Gatwick before the flight finally was ready to depart.

An uneventful flight later we landed in Hamburg, just as the S-Bahn was starting to become less frequent. I had 5 minutes to walk to the station and get a ticket, otherwise I’d have a 30 minute, rather than 10-minute wait. In the end I decided it was worth the extra to just walk the five yards or so to the taxi rank outside the terminal and catch a cab direct to my hotel.

In the end I arrived at my hotel at the same time as I would have been catching the train from the airport, with a 40-minute journey to complete. I checked in and headed up to my room to turn in for the night.