A nice morning overall, with a decent wake up time. I went and walked to the local baker to pick up some fresh focaccia for breakfast, grabbed my stuff and walked to the train station.


There’s a flea market in my street today. I would have liked to spend some time rummaging through vinyl records people are selling, but not today.


The first train today was a reasonably simple affair. I did elect to take the long way round to Utrecht, taking almost an hour via Amsterdam Zuid, but it saved me having to take local transport to The Hague Central station. With a departure time of 9:49, I wasn’t going to try to chase minutes and depart later.


The last couple of times I have been too late for focaccias, which is a shame, today I was one of the first, if not the first customer. Happy days.


I could have been departing Amsterdam around 12, if I had just taken the same train to the airport. Instead, a 3pm departure from Düsseldorf. 3 hours extra time would not be too bad, except…


We started here, and it only got worse.


I got out of the train in Utrecht, nice and on time, and went to check on my connection, which should have just left Amsterdam a couple minutes ago, to be immediately met with a 20 minute delay announcement.

Wouldn’t be Deutsche Bahn if it wasn’t something, would it? Annoyingly, the earlier ICE, the one that would have me running 4 hours early, was on time. Instead, I spent the next 45 minutes trying to see if the train has left, as several proposed departure times from Amsterdam came and went. In the end, the one that was about 45 minutes late didn’t change, and even though I couldn’t see the train on the tracker, all the apps and websites I was checking agreed that it left Amsterdam, and would pull in into Utrecht with a 40 minute delay, which would turn into a 50 minute delay in Germany. My buffer for delay is about an hour, maybe a bit more, so I can work with this, as long as it doesn’t get worse.
Regarding Plan B, I looked at later-in-the-day options from Amsterdam and Düsseldorf, not great. There is a cheap one, but it would have me overnight in Paris. I could deal with overnighting in Amsterdam, by way of going to my own bed, but a Paris airport hotel would wipe away any savings. The other option is a later Austrian flight. I would try and get myself changed to that, but I am not sure how amicable would Austrian be to a self-inflicted delay, even if I am a Senator with M&M. Worst case scenario, buy the late flight from DUS and hope travel insurance will pay up (apparently I can get all of about 12,50EUR from DB in case of an hours delay, almost enough to get a snack and a beer in the café car.)