Rothenburg; Thursday, 14 December, 2023

When I’d originally booked the trip, nearly a year earlier, I had a late night flight from Heathrow over to Frankfurt. In the interim flights had been chopped and changed and by the time everything finally settled I was booked onto a mid-evening flight out of City.

To make sure I made the flight I worked from home up until lunchtime and then hopped over to an airport hotel near City to work out of a room there on a day use rate for the rest of the day, leaving there just before 6 to walk over to the airport.

By the time I left the hotel there was only about 75 minutes until my flight left, and by the time I’d walked to city airport it was down to 55 minutes – which still turned out to be about 20 minutes earlier than I needed to be as the usual quick journey through security and then into the packed departures lounge occurred. I eventually wandered down to a gate area where there were no flights posted to sit down for about 10 minutes until our gate was displayed, which turned out to be the next door one.

Despite being a very full flight – the gate staff were insisting that everyone in groups 4 and 5 would have to give up their cabin bags into the hold – we boarded promptly and were all ready to go with about 5 minutes to spare, only to sit there for another quarter of an hour as a delayed inbound flight was bringing a connecting passenger.

With the flight finally boarded we set off and headed over to Frankfurt. It was a smooth and quick flight, with us landing 10 minutes ahead of schedule on a remote stand, but with buses and steps already waiting. As I only had hand luggage, and managed to get to the passport desks ahead of most people, I was through and on a train into the city within 40 minutes of landing, and in my hotel room barely an hour after touching the ground.