Well, I left you at Suvarnabhumi Airport, fortunately hitting “Publish” just before the free wi-fi connection dropped. It was a long flight, but I made it.

Things to note when making a long-haul journey. In fact, primarily… make sure you have enough stuff to do. I’d left my spare novel in my hold baggage so I started to worry what would happen if I finished the one I was reading. Fortunately, between snoozing and reading newspapers I managed to spin out the time.

I flew with FinnAir and they were OK. No individual screens for the videos, so EVA Airlines still wins my prize for best long-distance flight. A shame that was way back in 2006 and I’ve not had a comparable aeroplane since. It was a moderately filled flight, so I had a lot of room and the meals were as good as in-flight meals get.

There was one upset as we neared Helsinki after almost 10 hours of flying. One Thai gentleman a few rows behind got rather ill all of a sudden. Judging by the mass exodus of people from the seats around him, I think this may have involved a degree of “splosh”. Fortunately, the cabin crew saw to it swiftly and he was OK.

Other than that, I fell asleep during the recent Indiana Jones film though managed to suffer through Kit Kittredge though I don’t know how. Bad as Crystal Skull was, Kittredge was like a feature length episode of The Red Hand Gang. With hobos. And yet I couldn’t nod off to spare myself.

With my sanity barely intact, we landed at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport where I had a fairly painless swap onto my connecting flight. The only slowdown was the annoyingly thorough security check. Welcome to Europe. As is not uncommon, my laptop bag went through a second scan, I assume as it’s full of cables and stuff. I’ve still never been cautioned or queried about the half-empty toothpaste tube that’s always wedged in the front pocket.

It must be the only location in Finland where you can’t get free wi-fi although there are three companies competing for your cash to use a paid-for service. As ever, I didn’t even look at the pricing and just folded up my laptop and waited. Fortunately, due to some good scheduling, I only had an hour or so to wait for my flight to Dusseldorf. As far as airports go, it was OK, but nothing special. They start to look the same after a while.

Despite it only being a 2-hour flight I was fed a meal which was good as I’ve not bought a thing foodwise since I left my hostel in the morning. I also managed to cram in an hour’s sleep, waking just before we landed.

We touched down at Dusseldorf International at around 20:15 local time and I reckon my body was at around 23:00 with all the sleep I’d managed. Hopefully this would offset some of the jet lag. I had no immigration to deal with as I’d had my passport checked at Helsinki, so it was only a short delay before I picked up my rucksack and made my way to the connecting train station.

Here’s a hint – make sure you have change before buying a train ticket. The machines will only accept EC cards, 5- and 10-Euro notes and coins. The ATMs at the airport will only dish out 20-Euro bills. Fortunately, a woman behind me had two 10’s which she helpfully swapped.

An announcement came out over the tannoy which I didn’t understand. I did, however, pick up the body language of the other passengers – delay. Thankfully it was only ten minutes and by 22:00 I was stood outside Dusseldorf Hauptbahnhof waiting for Melanie (who I met at this year’s Graspop) to come and get me. A shame that Chris – my CouchSurfing host from last year – couldn’t make it.

With no further ado, she showed me to the hotel she’d sorted, I dumped my bags and went on the very important search for the bar area. Dusseldorf claims to be “Europe’s Biggest Bar” due to the number of alehouses in one small location, though I think Norris McWhirter would have had something to say about it.

Needless to say the only problem we had was picking one out of the variety of offer. Eventually we settled on an outdoors place with a very pretty barmaid and stared sinking the first of far too many “Alt”s. Two bars and much beer (and a few shooters) later, we staggered back to the hotel and crashed out.