Leiden; Thursday, 04 August, 2022

I’d timed a minicab to pick me up from home at the end of the working day, which – at least according to their website – would, on a Thursday during the height of the Summer Holidays – get me to City Airport with lots of time to spare. That would have worked fine if the driver had taken the suggested route via the Rotherhithe Tunnel, but instead decided to spend the best part of 90 minutes weaving through back roads to the Blackwall Tunnel, where we promptly got stuck in a 15-minute-long traffic jam.

Not helping was the fact that I still wasn’t checked in as the British Airways covid document verification had failed to work (turns out that the Dutch locator form they insisted I had to fill out wasn’t required and that jammed their system up), so once I got to the airport, I still had to check-in and even at City you can’t leave it to the last minutes to check-in.

The taxi eventually got to the airport 50 minutes before my departure time, so still 30 minutes ahead of check-in closing, but still a lot tighter than I would have liked.

City Airport itself was very busy and in the end I had to walk all the way down to Gate 7 to find anywhere to sit. Thankfully it turned out that this was a good idea as a few minutes later the screens updated to show we would be leaving from Gate 9 so I was able to quickly wander down and be at the front of the queue for boarding – ensuring I could get my luggage into the overhead bins.

An uneventful if very quick flight across to Amsterdam, and for the first time in a very long time we landed on a runway next to the terminal, rather than the one that takes 15 minutes to taxi from.

The tales of chaos at Schiphol had been on a par with those at Manchester and Heathrow, which was part of the reason for going hand luggage only, so I was quite surprised at how quickly I was able to pass through immigration – I thought I was going to be in a queue there for hours, but in the end I was through in under 5 minutes, and 10 minutes later was already sat on the train to go the one stop to the town of Hoofddorp and my hotel for the night.