s-Hertogenbosch; Thursday, 13 August, 2026

With the temperatures in London almost touching 100F, as the fifth heatwave of the summer gripped the city, and a forecast tropical night making the chance of getting any restful sleep almost impossible I was quite glad to be heading to a hotel that I knew had decent air-conditioning.

Having finished work for the day I headed down to the station to catch the train on the first leg of the journey over to London City Airport, that could easily have gone very wrong with the capitals transport infrastructure already creaking in the intense heat, but for once it was as smooth as it could have been, making the connection onto the Overground without any problems and at Canada Water swapping straight onto the Jubilee line with a train already in the platform when I got down there.

At Canning Town I only had to wait a couple of minutes for the DLR round to the airport and less than 70 minutes after leaving home I was joining the security queue at City.

It took quite a bit longer than normal to get through security, the queue was a lot longer than normal by City standards, but even so it was barely 10 minutes until I was through into departures where I grabbed a quick bite to eat before wandering down to the gate a couple of minutes before boarding started.

The plane was parked at the gate that was closest to the western end of the runway, which was fortunate as the take-offs were from here, which meant that our taxi time was measured in seconds rather than minutes, and with an on time pushback and a very quick hop over the North Sea we landed in Amsterdam early and pulled up on stand 10 minutes ahead of schedule.

The last couple of times I’d been through Amsterdam, pre EES, the queues for non-EU passports had been horrific with it taking over 30 minutes, but now with the Entry Exit system up and running it was incredibly smooth – straight up to a kiosk to register the visit then down into the immigration hall and straight through an eGate and into the country. The longest part was the 20 seconds or so it took to register at the Kiosk, other than that I was moving the whole time.

I’d originally been looking at connections from the airport to my hotel for the night at a little after 10pm, but with an early arrival and an express immigration process I was an hour earlier than I expected so I just headed down to the platform at Schiphol, just missing a connection to Hoofddorp, though the next train was only 5 minutes behind – and that officially became the longest wait of the entire smooth journey from home.

I checked into the hotel, popped up to my room to make sure I’d cranked down the air-conditioning before heading down to the bar for a drink, and then back to my room for, hopefully, the first good night’s sleep in several days.