Saying good bye to the young man who had shared the room  with me, wishing him the best of luck in his hunt for a job in the UK. A nice lad, we got on very well I thought, considering our totally different backgrounds and ages , he was young enough to be a grandson!
A taxi ordered had me up to the station in minutes, I would not have been able to cope with the hill climb with my bags so I felt the expense waa justified.
Having bought my ticket the day before it was interestingly the same price as the online tickets but with out the rip off creditcard charge. The London train was late so I immediately  caught the Gatwick express. Great way to ride the rails. It was the first time I had been to Gatwick airport, although it was still under construction, I suspect it is probably always under construction!  An excellent airport, not the size of Heathrow, but user friendly ,thats for sure. I had a couple of hours to kill before checkin so its games on the iPad and food! I was dissappointed the airport din’t have a free wifi connection at the time. In todays world I should have thought it would be a standard for this sort of airport, or any airport for that matter.

I checked my bag weight on an empty scale, it came in at 19.9 kgs just under the 20 kgs I had paid for. I checked in as early as possible to get rid of the bag, it is just too  heavy to pull around. Airport time goes very quickly for me and soon we were being herded on to the plane, half in the dry corridor the other half outside in the rain at the back end of the plane!
I was thrilled to get a seat next to the crew and the exit of the plane, at the time seats were not allocated. An airbus, I am never happy riding one of them unfortunately. My brother as  a flight engineer never approved of them, so it remains in my mind.

It was a short flight and a relatively smooth one, a small amount of turbulence wasn’t enough to upset anyones equilibrium.
The meal I had bought filled up time as did the iPad, and soon I was looking down on the patchwork fields of Austria. I later discovered the various crops included sunflowers all in full bloom, grains, onions , and of course many other crops for animal and human use.

It was on arrival that the great flight all turned to custard! There had been power outages in the Vienna district and as a consequence the airport was on auxillary power. It also meant that the toilets had emergency lighting only  and this didn’t extend to the cubilcles!  This meant that the baggage coming off the planes couldn’t be put on the carousels. It was starting to pile up,  when we arrived there was already huge amounts of luggage waiting. Some three hours later after standing or sitting around a packed airport with no airconditioning in a 35 degree heat, we were able to pick up our cases and move on to the city. The ipad comes into its own for helping pass the time especially if you are able to use a free wifi network. Some airports have them, other times there may be an unlocked network to hook into. Fortunately Vienna airport was a modern one.

After eventually getting my bag I went towards the Cat station, short for City Airport Transfer or transport. At a cost of €12 it was a lot cheaper than the €30-35 taxi ride . A fast and comfortable ride, still had to take a short taxi ride to the hotel but I had little choice, strange city at midnight!
It was good to see a nice bed in a private room after my stay with the nine bunk, three tier accommodation I had previously!
Unfortunately the room was very hot despite having the window open, given the outside tempurature was in the thirties, and no air conditioner or fan.
Sleeping on top of the bed, I had to flick off the occaisional insect or bug. This gave me little sleep for the night .