Taxi arrived early to take me to Humberside airport. Said he was glad of the job as it got him out of Lincoln where the arrival of the tour de britain (or similar) cycle race was expected this morning. Lots of road closures. Told me he’d started work at 3:30 am so that he could finish before the bikes arrived. THG was planning to go and watch them whizz by. Over in the blink of an eye I’d imagine. The flutter of eyelashes.
Now on the 09:50 from HUY to AMS. sbeen a while since I’ve flown from here. Easy. Small airport with more helicopter and private jet flights than schedule airlines, the only one of which seems to be KLM. It’s an expensive airport to fly from but with v cheap duty free. The sales assistant persuaded me that as I was only away for less than 48 hours I could keep the duty free gin in sealed bags which would be acceptable to the security people on the return trip. This was a new one on me but with a litre of tanqueray at £12.50 I decided it was worth taking the risk. Even though the flights aint cheap the alternative is train to london and then eurostar. A whole days journey and probably more expensive, at least in business class. It isn’t worth paying an extra £500 for business class on this 45min flight. I’ve paid that much to upgrade to first with BA on a transatlantic flight. Now that was a reasonable deal I thought.
Breakfasted before security. I was the only person in the restaurant. £10 ish for a full english, tea, toast and a glass of milk. They gave me the milk free. It wasn’t on the pricelist. Just poured me a cupful from the sugar/milk station. Bit warm. The food was bearable but the service was top notch.
They printed both boarding cards on the one piece of paper this trip. Not seen that before. Mustn’t lose the bit of paper though they can easily print me another I guess. The only negative about the AMS flight is the return leg where the queues to get through security are notoriously long and i have no status to get in the priority queue. It wasn’t worth the cost of the biz class upgrade to skip the line. I will see if they have a paid for option for fast track though i don’t remember that they do.
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Now on the train to Amsterdam central. 11.75 euros return. I did initially jump in a taxi to save me the effort of buying a ticket but when the driver told me it would be 93 euros one way I jumped out again. The hotel, the Barbizon Palace is directly opposite the train station.
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Turns out I’d bought a bus ticket not a train ticket so I couldn’t get out through the station barriers, doh. The woman in the kiosk said at least I’d paid for the ticket and gave me a free barcode to get me out!