Rotterdam; Saturday, 24 October, 2015

It wasn’t the earliest flight I’d ever had, but with planned engineering works potentially making the journey down to Gatwick difficult I’d opted to spend the night beforehand in a hotel at the airport, so I’d had a bit of a lie-in and 5 minutes after checking out of the hotel was dropping my bag back off with bag drop and heading into the departures lounge.

An on time departure and early arrival into Amsterdam was only slightly put out of kilter by the plane landing on the furthest possible runway at Schiphol, so by the time we’d spent 15 minute taxying around the airport perimeter we were back on correct arrival time.

The usual long hike through the airport and then a bit of a wait for luggage meant that I missed the train to Rotterdam by about 5 minutes and ended up with a 25 minute wait for the next one. Thankfully the next one was a high speed train direct to Rotterdam and took less than 30 minutes to get me there.

I picked up the tram outside the station to the stop nearest to the hotel, checked-in, dropped my stuff off and then went for a wander around the city.

Rotterdam, like much of the rest of the Netherlands, is a very easy city to wander around being flat, though its noticeably much more built up and high-rise than even Amsterdam and with very wide roads at times it took some time just to go a short distance as you waited interminably for three directions of road traffic, then a couple of massive herds of cyclists to cross before a green man appeared to let you get to a traffic islands in the middle of the dual carriageway to repeat the same process over again.

In the end I only realised how long I’d been wandering when I realised the sun was starting to set so I took that as a cue to locate a restaurant, have some dinner and then cheat and get the tram back to the hotel and my comfy bed.