Stuttgart; Thursday, 14 July, 2005

After the fortnight from hell (Everyone I work with was under threat of redundancy) I left work safe in the knowledge that my job was safe but with far less time than I wanted to get across London and out to Stansted.

With my usual rote closed by the previous week’s terrorist attack I was planning to walk the last part to Liverpool Street station, but that was thwarted when the Metropolitan line decided it would be a good time to have a series of signal failures. I ended up wandering around the Faringdon street area until I managed to hail a cab and take the expensive route to Liverpool Street, only to find that I could probably have walked it in time as there was a 30 minute gap between trains instead of the usual 15 minutes!

With a, thankfully, uneventful train journey to Stansted I arrived to find that checkin wasn't due to open for another 25 minutes anyway! After checking in and going through a noticeably more thorough security check than usual I found a restaurant to grab a bite to eat in before heading to the gate and my flight.

The plane was almost on time leaving and managed to make up time on route to end up at Stuttgart airport 5 minutes early. Spectacularly my bag was the third one off; unfortunately the penalty for this was a missing handle! In the end it didn't make any difference as at 11:00 at night the trains are only half hourly and I had missed the previous one by 10 minutes!

Personally I'm blaming the fact I had had a stressful day in work and 7 hours of travelling for the total failure of my usually perfect sense of direction. At the hauptbahnhof I went onto the wrong platform and ended up catching the right train, in the wrong direction. I corrected that at the next station, but it still left me with a further 15 minute wait, so I didn't get to my hotel until gone midnight.