It may have been the first day of my holiday, but I’m still a runner, and I still needed to get a training run in ahead of my marathon in Larnaca at the end of the year. With today being a long day of travel, the best time to get this in was before breakfast. I did five miles, knowing my mileage would be reduced over the next few days, and then got ready for the journey to London to meet-up with Carmen. I wanted to be on the road as early as possible, hoping that even if it was before 09:00 I’d only be hitting the tail-end of rush hour traffic.

For this trip we were flying from London Heathrow Terminal 2, but rather than taking the underground or parking up there, I decided I’d rather take an Uber as a balance between price and time taken. If we’d taken the train, we’d have had to go into London, just come straight back out and would have wasted time. If I’d parked there it would have cost at least £100 for a few days. I’d pre-booked the Uber, and had selected the right address, but knew that at the time of confirming they’d selected the next-door neighbour instead. Not really a problem, but it seemed such a strange thing for Uber to do.

In the end I headed out at 08:30, almost two hours before the Uber was scheduled to arrive. For the most part the motorway was fairly free of traffic, possibly due to it being around the school holidays now. When I reached the outskirts of Luton, that all changed, and the traffic got steadily worse, until we were all at a standstill. There’d been an accident at the next junction, and the motorway was now closed. With my engine now switched off after already having waited thirty minutes, I checked online and found that the estimated time for the road to re-open was 11:45. Google Maps and Waze were both predicting about a ninety minute journey time, which would mean me missing the Uber I’d booked.

Time passed, with the sun glaring down on me, but I avoided drinking any of the water I’d got with me as I couldn’t be certain how much longer I’d be stuck there, and if I needed a toilet it could be a long wait. I watched the clock constantly as my ETA edged closer to my booking. I messaged Carmen to let her know the situation and suggested that she should take the Uber, even if I didn’t make it - I’d have to book another for myself once I’d arrived.

After about an hour had passed, and earlier than estimated, the road reopened, and I made it into London with a little time to spare. The Uber then got us to Heathrow in good time, and from there baggage drop and security were straight-forward and quick.

There’s quite a few food options at Heathrow Terminal 2, and I thought even though I usually have something small at midday, knowing it’d be quite late we’d get to eat tonight it might be better to have something more substantial. Looking at the options though, it seemed a lot of the prices had soared since I was last there, and we decided our best option was a meal deal from WHSmiths.

The flight from London to Vienna is around two hours, and they serve both a glass of water and a round piece of chocolate made in Salzburg. Even though we were one of the last to leave the aircraft, and pretty much the last through passport control, the baggage collection hadn’t started when we got there. It wasn’t too much of a wait though, and we were soon on our way to the train station.

There are two different trains you can get from the airport into the city. The first of these is the faster CAT, but quite a bit more expensive at around €25 per person for a return ticket. The cheaper option is the S7 train which isn’t that much slower, and costs €4.40 per person for the trip. It’d also get us much closer to where we were staying without needing to change trains as the CAT would only take us into the city centre. We’d both installed the WeinMobil application on our phones to make buying transport tickets easier, and meant we could get a 72 hour ticket to save even more money.

On our way to the station we tried to get our tickets via the mobile app, but it wouldn’t find any stations containing ‘Flughafen’ or ‘airport’. Fortunately there are ticket machines above the platforms, and found from there that a group ticket for the two of us was only €7.80.

We were getting into Praterstern too late to make it to Pennymarkt or Lidl, but there was a Billa supermarket in the station we could use for getting bits for our evening meal tonight, and for breakfast and lunch tomorrow. What we needed between us came to €27.76 which isn’t bad for three meals for two people. If we’d chosen to eat out instead it would have cost more, even though maybe not quite as much as in London, or in Guernsey where it had cost more than three times that for two people to eat out per day.

Last time we arrived in a city or town late at night and needed to find our accommodation, the details we got from AirBNB were not the best and we spent a long time walking around a street in Eastbourne trying to find the place we were meant to be. This time I felt like I knew where I was going. However, finding the lockbox for the key wasn’t so easy as the written instructions didn’t match up with the Google pushpin, so it was important to refer to that instead (where it had said continue straight on actually needed a turn right before that).

The AirBNB was simple, but had everything we’d need for a few days. Except for air conditioning. With how warm it was in there, we knew it was going to be an uncomfortably warm weekend, but there was at least a fan we could plug in and use.

I made us a tuna pasta bake, and by the time we were done it was already quite late. It had been a long day of travel for me, but at last it was over.