Hamburg; Tuesday, 04 June, 2024

A final breakfast of the trip and after checking out of the hotel, we headed back to the Alster to take a final water based activity.

In this instance we booked onto the tour of the Alster and norther canals, taking a two hour tour that headed up through the larger Alster lake and then into the canal network, this included a detour into a lake in the Stadtpark and a quick spin around the Rondeelteich, home to some of the most expensive property in the city.

Back at the landing stage in Jungfernstieg we stopped for a very pleasant lunch before I left mum sitting by the lake and headed back to the hotel to grab our bags, come back to Jungfernstieg to collect mum and then head on back to the airport.

Another not so great experience with the assistance at the airport as they took us straight through passport control (where there was quite a bit of confusion about the lack of Entry stamps until we mentioned about assistance landing us incorrectly and the immigration officer rolled his eyes, shot a filthy look at the totally innocent member of assistance who was escorting us, and stamped us out of Schengen), and dumped us at the gate nearly 2 hours before the flight with only toilets and a small café, not even a duty free shop!

We had been dumped at the correct gate at the time, but due to delays the plane that should have long since departed the gate was still sat there when our BA flight landed, and consequently our plane had to park out on the airfield and our gate was changed. It also meant rather than having an airbridge they could just wheel mum (and one other assistance passenger on crutches who had also been dumped with us at the wrong gate) onto the plane they needed to find a lifting machine, which took a little bit of time, but in the end we were escorted round to the correct gate and loaded up onto the flight.

A smooth and pleasant flight back to London, and on arrival at a remote gate there was even an assistance lift machine waiting for us, but as we arrived it got called away so in the end, after the rest of the plane had departed it was just the crew, us and the guy with the crutches left on board. After a while the captain let the cabin crew get away as their day had ended, and sent the first officer off to the other side of the airport to get their next flight up to Manchester set up, leaving him with us until the assistance finally turned up 20 minutes later. To add to the problems the assistance team didn’t want to have to take the captain with them, even though they were going to delay the Manchester flight, but in the end they relented and after dropping the captain off at his next plane we were finally landed into UK arrivals to find our bags and mums walker sat by themselves next to the baggage belt.

And just to finish on a high three different Uber drivers accepted and then cancelled the ride to take us back home before we finally, nearly 2 hours after landing, managed to leave Heathrow.