s-Hertogenbosch; Sunday, 16 August, 2026

I had a late checkout already pre-approved by the hotel, so I was able after breakfast to just head out of the hotel and into town, heading over to the centre of the city to pick up one of the canal cruises around the inner canals of the city centre.

The tour I booked onto included a visit to one of the former bastions of the city, and would normally have been conducted in Dutch, but they had two boat loads of customers this morning and there were enough English speakers to mostly fill a boat, plus a couple of Dutch people who were happy to take the tour in English that the company very kindly ran one boat in English.

After walking a short distance through the city to our mooring point we board the small electric boats that the company uses to glide silently around and under the city, with many of the canals going through long tunnels under churches, buildings and squares, making for a very different tour to many other Dutch cities canal networks.

The tour lasted for nearly 90 minutes, which meant I only had a little bit of time to wander around the city centre before I needed to head back to the hotel and pack my room up, checkout and head to the station for the return, round the houses, journey to Schiphol.

Thankfully the connections in this direction all worked perfectly with the train pulling into Breda on the adjacent platform to my onwards connection to Schiphol as a synchronised arrival, with both trains coming to a halt at the same time.

I’d left quite a bit of time to get through Schiphol airport as it can either be the smoothest airport to get through, or passport control can get very backed up. Today was both a backed-up passport control and a secondary screening of my bag, so I was glad I’d left plenty of time.

I had a little time in the lounge before heading down to the gate just as my group was being called. Unlike British Airways boarding at Schiphol which always felt like barely controlled chaos and takes forever, the KLM boarding (of a fully loaded A321) was much more efficient with us ready to go in less than 20 minutes after the first boarding started (and no waiting on the jet bridge to actually get on board!)

The flight back to the UK was smooth, with us making it to the gate in Terminal 4 a good 10 minutes ahead of schedule. This was my first journey through Terminal 4 in nearly a decade, so it was a little weird seeing a bit of Heathrow I never normally go through, though with the efficiency of KLM it wasn’t going to be another 10 years before I would be back here.