Maastricht; Thursday, 07 August, 2025

As it was an early evening flight from City airport, I was able to do a full day’s work before hopping on the train up towards London and then swapping via the Windrush and Jubilee lines onto the DLR to the terminal, arriving with about an hour to spare before my flight.

I had a quick bite to eat before heading down to the gate and pretty quickly afterwards we were called forward to board with the plane all ready to go 10 minutes ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, with Schiphol being such a busy airport we weren’t allowed to leave early, and in the end had to wait for the KLM flight that had managed to start up it’s engines a couple of seconds ahead of us to head out to the runway first for it’s flight to Amsterdam before we followed a couple of minutes behind it.

It was a very bumpy journey over the North Sea with pretty bad turbulence from almost the moment we left land up until pretty much the Dutch coast, but the crew on board still provided a full service.

Despite the bumps, and the long taxi in from the Polder Runway, we still made it to the gate ahead of schedule and soon I was on the long walk from the end of the D gates to immigration, which – despite the numbers in the hall – was surprisingly quick, taking barely 10 minutes to get through.

I headed over to the railway station and only had a couple of minutes to wait before the next train heading towards Hoofddorp station, one stop down the line, which was close to my hotel for the night, and about 30 minutes earlier than I’d even hoped for when I booked, I was at the hotel pretty soon after.

I checked in, dropped off my stuff in the room and took advantage of the complimentary drink voucher to have a pint before heading back to my room and turning in for the night.