Braunschweig; Thursday, 07 September, 2023

I was starting to get convinced that any attempt to get to Braunschweig was doomed to failure. I’d originally booked for November 2020, but the second national lockdown in the UK put paid to that. An attempt to rebook for the summer of 2021 also got cancelled due to being on the Novavax covid vaccine trials and consequently not having a recognised jab to get into Germany.

I’d finally rebooked the trip in late 2022 with flights out of London early on the Friday morning and a return late on Sunday evening. That all changed early in the new year when BA cancelled the Sunday night flight and moved me back onto a flight mid-afternoon, and at the same time pushed the morning flight back by a couple of hours, leaving me with only just over a day in Braunschweig once I’d got there from the Airport in Hannover.

Thankfully, because the inbound flight change was by over 5 hours I was able to, after a lengthy call to the airline, change the outbound flight back to the Thursday evening free of charge, but even then that flight moved three times before finally settling on 19:40, in that time I’d had to cancel a hotel booking in Heathrow, book a hotel in Hannover and then get a day-use booking for a hotel in Heathrow when the flight at one point crept forward to 18:00

In the end I probably didn’t need the day use room as I could have gotten to Heathrow in time after finishing work, but given very unseasonably hot weather was hitting London I decided the beautiful air-conditioning of the Hilton Garden Inn at Hatton Cross was too much of a draw and over my lunch break I headed over to the hotel to work out of in the afternoon.

By the time I finished work for the evening I was actually shivering from how cold I’d managed to get the room – so walking back out into the wall of heat leaving the hotel was a bit of a shock to the body.

I headed over to Hatton Cross station and caught the tube round to Terminal 5 to catch my flight.

Another spanner that had been hurled into the works then appeared as a quick check on the Deutscher Bahn website showed that due to engineering works the half hourly S-Bahn service from the airport into town had been cut back to an hourly service, with the train due to leave just 20 minutes after my flight was due to land.

Thankfully the flight left Heathrow on time, and made good progress over to Hannover landing 15 minutes ahead of schedule, and with nothing else landing at the same time as us I was through immigration and down onto the railway station with a good 10 minutes to spare before the inbound train even arrived.

I caught the train down into town and then walked the short distance over to my hotel for the night.