Gothenburg; Sunday, 18 September, 2016

The hotel, very conveniently, offers a 6pm checkout on Sunday’s so I was able to take advantage of that and after breakfast head out into town without worrying about packing first.

First stop of the morning was the aquarium and maritime museum located a couple of tram stops south of the hotel. I had a long look around these before picking up the tram again and heading round to the Natural History Museum.

The museum looks like a very traditional museum, with lots of exhibits in wooden cases down long corridor exhibition spaces, and the vast number of stuffed animals does make it more resemble a killing field than a museum, but given the age of the museum you have to kind of accept that’s how things were done back then.

I had a wander back through the large park that the museum is located in to pick up the tram from the opposite side of the park back into town, where I joined the penultimate boat tour of the canals for the afternoon.

After the very interesting tour it was time to head back to the hotel, pack my bags, and head on out to the airport.

I had over four hours till my flight and I had originally planned to stop in the city centre for dinner before heading out to the airport, but for some reason I decided to head straight for the airport bus and whilst I was on it check my flight. At this point it was already badly delayed and I started to get the impression that I might not be flying back to Gatwick any time soon.

By the time I got to the airport the delay had increased so I asked a lady on the Norwegian check-in desk what the chances of the flight actually arriving were. As she worked for a handling agent rather than the airline she was able to be a little more candid with me than a Norwegian employee would probably have been and advised that the chances of leaving tonight would be 50/50 at best, given the flight had never been less than an hour late all year.

Deciding it wasn’t worth the risk I headed over to the ticket counter for British Airways to enquire about the chances of getting onto their flight. The very helpful lady there said there were still a fair number of seats but my best bet would be to book a return flight online, with the return leg really far in the future as that would be cheaper by a couple of thousand kroner.

I checked online and as she’d described a single flight was nearly 4,000Kr but a return flight was a little over 2,000Kr so I booked the plane for 2 and a half hours’ time and a return leg at the end of June 2017 and then wandered back into the airport to the BA desk to check-in.

Through into departures, and a little while later the inevitable announcement that the Norwegian flight had been cancelled came over the Tannoy, and a short while later a text from Norwegian telling me that my flight was now 2pm the following afternoon (that flight was subsequently delayed and didn’t leave until gone 9pm, 23 hours after the original departure time). It was with a great sense of relief that I relaxed into the comfort of my BA seat at the plane pushed back on time and headed me back towards London.