Groningen; Friday, 21 June, 2013

I’d booked a half day’s leave so I could get an earlier flight to Amsterdam, and as usual it was a struggle to make sure I got away from work on time. Only 20 minutes after I should have been on leave I finally managed to get out of the building and head to East Croydon station.

I had a smooth journey down to Gatwick, and up until about 45 minutes before the flight was due to depart everything appeared to be running smoothly, then for no given reason the flight suddenly went to being 45 minutes delayed, which is a pretty big delay on a 60 minute flight.

We were eventually called to a gate 20 minutes after we were supposed to have departed, and by the time we finally pushed back it was nearly an hour late, though BA did have a pretty compelling reason, the plane we should have been on had developed a technical fault and they wanted to use a working plane instead!

An uneventful flight saw us land on a runway at Schiphol airport that was probably closer to Rotterdam than it was to Amsterdam. Doing at least 30 mph the plane still took over 15 minutes to get to the gate, and once there it was another 20 minutes’ walk through the terminal building to get to immigration and baggage.

Having collected my stuff I wandered down to the train station to wait for my train to Groningen.

Over 3 hours after landing at Schiphol I finally disembarked the train at Groningen and found a taxi to take me to the hotel.

It was thankfully a very quick checkin and then straight to bed.