Gone with the wind

The flight: on schedule until it wasn't

Travelling days are never very productive, but rarely as unproductive as Monday 28 October, the day on which I had planned to trafel back (or is it forth?) to York, but also the day in which autumn had decided that it was high time to show its supremacy.

After panicky warnings by the news services (Severest storm in 25 years! Don't go into the woods tonight! Leave your bike at home, and stay there yourself as well if you value your life!) and worries by all around me, I decided to take an hour extra for the train, meaning that a smooth trip would have dropped me at the airport three hours before departure instead of the one I know to be sufficient. This meant that in theory I still had well over two hours of net work time at home, but what with packing, saying goodbye and checking the news about the weather every ten minutes, not much remained of that.

Elise dropped me off at the station, and the train appeared exactly on time, so all started out well. The KLM had kindly sent me a mail that flights might be delayed, and a link to an app that would allow me to check the status of my own flight; but that stubbornly went on saying "on schedule", which in combination with the fact that it listed some earlier flights to Manchester as cancelled (without which I would have started wondering whether the information was being kept up-to-date) looked reassuring.

Unfortunately the prophesied chaos was not long in emerging. The train was slowing down more and more, with weaker and weaker excuses being offered by the announcers: at first we were "behind a slow train", then on the stretch from Apeldoorn to Amersfoort we were hampered by "slippery rails", which given that we had to surmount all of the 50 (or is it 100?) meters elevation of the Veluwe bulge meant we were fortunate not to be asked to get out and help push. Downhill we made better speed, but before we reached Amersfoort it we learned that the train would get no further than Hilversum. No counsel was offered as to how to proceed to Schiphol; I decided to try and go via Utrecht, which by the Dutch Railways app was still listing that as a possible connection.

The situation at the stations, both in Amersfoort and in Utrecht, was quite amusing if you were in the right state of mind - which, given that I thought to have ample time, I still was. The announcers did not for ten seconds stop giving off messages that one or the other train was delayed, sometimes "for an unknown duration", or would not arrive at all. After some point they stopped mentioning individual trains and abstracted by advising the public to stop trying to travel by train at all - which is quite hilarious considering that those assembled were there for that purpose and no other. They were essentially saying "please go home and don't bother us".

In Amersfoort they tried to ameliorate the situation by commiserating and offering all those poor travellers (who were actually taking it rather stoically, after all you had to have been living under a rock not to know that there was a good chance of something like this happening) free coffee or tea, which was a nice gesture. When trying to take advantage of this, however, I found out that espresso is not coffee.

Utrecht only showed one train going in a westerly direction at all, and that only to the small town of Breukelen, and by then also the railways app had become a lot less optimistic about open routes to Schiphol. Time to turn to the fallback solution of taking a taxi; the remaining distance was less than 40 kilometers after all. I convinced a cab driver to turn the meter off and bring me there for an even 100 Euro, which sounded high to me but when he left his meter on after all, ostensibly to be within regulations in the event he would be stopped, it turned out I had indeed saved about 20 Euro this way.

Schiphol appeared to be rather unshaken, in fact when I got there the worst of the storm was over in that part of the Netherlands (not that I had seen much of it myself at all) and from there on it was business pretty much as usual. I was in good time, and though the flight did incur a little delay in the end, it was well within the bounds of the ordinary.

In Manchester I went to visit Joes and Nicole as planned. I believe I saw them last when we were still living in Germany and they in the Netherlands - which makes it somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago. (We were ever so much younger then...) I had a very pleasant dinner and evening going over the experiences of Dutchmen living in England (you have to learn to say sorry all the time, and a helmet for bicyclists is no sinecure), the ups and downs in applying for adoption under the English system, the failure of either politicial parties or voting (opinions differed) as a system to uphold democracy. We ended with a game of Roborally, an oldie which I actually never got around to playing before: nice party game, which I imagine gets better when the party is bigger.

Roborally: avoid the pits

A taxi brought me to the Manchester Piccadilly, a train brought me to York, and after waiting in vain for the last bus for 20 minutes, I got another taxi to bring me to the university. University Road is closed due to scheduled roadworks, possibly that's why the bus didn't go but no reason to fail to notify travellers. In any case, I think 4 taxis on one day is a record for me. I was certainly very glad (and tired) to be home.