After a very busy few days ticking off three new countries, exploring three new cities and travelling on three international trains it was time to break the run of threes and catch the first of two flights that would get me back to Heathrow to end my trip. Despite booking my flights with Lufthansa, I was actually flying with a different member of the Lufthansa Group, Swiss International Air Lines, commonly known simply as Swiss.

Almost exactly 20 months since my last flight, I was finally heading to an airport ready for a trip abroad, with this one being a multi-country, week-long exploration of Central Europe covering Czechia, Hungary & Slovakia. But before I got to tick off any new countries, I had a journey to Heathrow and two flights with Lufthansa to complete.

After a great few days in and around the Dutch capital, we were back at the city’s Schiphol airport ready for our flight back to Birmingham with KLM. Having dropped our hand luggage off for check-in and spent a bit of time up at the viewing terrace, we headed through security and into the main departure lounge.

Just five days after returning from Dublin, I was back at Birmingham airport to fly to Amsterdam and try another new airline, KLM. KLM is the Dutch flag carrier and in 2019 celebrated its 100th birthday, with the airline being the oldest in continuous operation with the same name. KLM operates up to five return flights a day from its Amsterdam hub to Birmingham and we were booked onto the early afternoon departure, which is generally operated by KLM subsidiary, KLM Cityhopper with one of their Embraer E-jets.

After being lucky with the weather whilst exploring Dublin over the previous two days, I woke up early on the Monday morning to the sound of heavy rain outside the window. Thankfully before I left the BnB the rain had let up and only a light drizzle accompanied me for my walk back to the nearby stop for the AirLink bus.

Towards the end of February, I was lucky enough to become rather familiar with Birmingham airport, flying from it two weekends in a row for international trips. The first of these trips was a short hop across the Irish Sea to the capital of the emerald isle, Dublin, flying with Ireland’s national carrier Aer Lingus.