Natwest Tower - Frankfurt in five hours

Yesterday I was in a meeting in London all day. Due to some restrictions to night flights in Frankfurt, I had to take a plane from London Heathrow at 20:10 CET (19:10 GMT), so I had to leave the venue of my meeting, the former Natwest Tower (by the way, I read a book with architectural wonders when I was a child and the Natwest Tower was there!) in the City, at 17:30 CET (16:30 GMT). I thought that would give me enough time to have an easy trip back home but I was somehow wrong.

First, following the advice of a former colleague, I decided to go from the City to Paddington, where I should take the Heathrow Express, using the Circle Line from Liverpool Street, instead of my original plan of going with the Central Line from Bank to Oxford Circus and then changing to the Bakerloo Line until Paddington. In overall terms, I saved two stations and a change of line, so it looked like quite a good idea. But it was not. First, the Circle Line is no longer a perfect circle, since it has some kind of strange diversion going to Hammersmith, so I had to change trains in Great Portland Street or in Baker Street. After some thinking, needless to say, I chose wrong: Baker Street, because I had to walk to a different platform. After seven minutes waiting, the second train was quite crowded and it needed 15 minutes to cover three stations. Probably it could not go faster with the huge amount of passengers it was carrying.

Anyway, once arrived to Paddington, due to some works, I could not walk directly to the train platforms but had to take, again, a diversion. It took some time but I finally managed to come to the area of the Heathrow Express. Then, after waiting ten minutes for departure, the train I was in had a problem with one door, so I had to change train, with a further delay of ten minutes. Once the train left Paddington, the trip to Heathrow was somehow fine.

Once in Heathrow, I had to hurry up to buy some presents and some food for my dinner, before boarding the plane for Frankfurt. However, once seated in the plane, the pilot told us that he has ordered some ice-breaking liquid for the wings, so we will be like fifteen minutes delayed. As a consequence of this, we lost our place in the take-off queue in Heathrow, so we were reallocated again (new delay).

The pilot did his best to fly as fast as possible in order to compensate our late taking-off. Nevertheless, conditions were not easy at Frankfurt, with some snow. That meant that we landed at one corner of the airport and we had to taxi 20 minutes until we reached our final position, which, obviously, was outside, not in a finger. After a trip in bus, where I thought the driver did not fully understand the concept of "not-to-use-the-brakes-too-abruptly", we had to go through the passport control, where, following my normal curse, I chose the slow queue.

All in all, what I thought should be an easy and relaxing trip became a nightmare with many small delays which finally implied that it took me five hours to arrive to Frankfurt from the City of London. There was not any huge problem but I could not have a minute of relax in this time. Let's hope my next trips to London are a bit easier...