Leipzig; Friday, 04 April, 2014

An earlyish flight from Heathrow so I’d stayed over the previous evening at an airport hotel. Consequently it was a relatively smooth and quick journey into the central bus station and then on to Terminal 5 on the Heathrow Express (even if it was nearly 5 minutes late)

Heathrow itself was heaving, with many schools having a teacher training day and the holidays starting there appeared to be a mass exodus in full swing.

The flight left, on time, from gate 1 which turned out to be almost the completely opposite end of the terminal building from where I was when they announced it, and by the time I got to the gate they were making a final call.

We pushed back on time and had a smooth take-off, which was the last smooth part of the flight. Due to the particular atmospheric conditions there was turbulence at all heights across most of Western Europe and the best the pilots could do was get us into a pocket of mild turbulence rather than the full on plane rattling that was at our originally assigned height.

The bumping only really came to an end once we came below about 10,000 feet on final descent into Berlin, by which time the turbulence had taken its toll on a few of my fellow passengers.

Down on the ground and a quick baggage claim and uninterrupted stroll through customs and out to the bus over to the Hauptbahnhof meant that I had nearly two hours to kill before my train, but thankfully I’d paid the extra couple of euros to upgrade to first so could kill that time in the very pleasant DB Lounge

Pulling into Leipzig bang on time I wandered the short distance from the station to my hotel and checked in, dropped my stuff off and then went for a wander through town.

Just as it was starting to get dark, and my stomach was starting to rumble, I found myself on the main street of restaurants, so after a quick browse found a very nice Bierkeller for a leisurely dinner. I’d chosen a table outside which was very nice, but the layout of the pavement meant that I was sitting slightly awkwardly for most of dinner, but I didn’t really notice until I stood to get up to leave and found that my leg had almost completely gone to sleep.

With some feeling, and an odd twinge in the muscles, in my leg I had a bit more of a wander before heading back to the hotel for what I thought would be a good night’s sleep.

And for the first couple of hours I was right.