70th birthday trip, Tuesday 6 June. Travel day 1/15

Well, we should be en route to Stockholm now, but actually we are still sitting in Hamburg station. The train is here, and we are in bed in it, but it should have left 40 minutes ago.

We got up at sparrowfart this morning and arrived at St Pancras in plenty of time for our Eurostar. Compared to our Christmas trip, there was virtually no queue to check in and go through security and passport control. As we have first class passes, we could travel in Standard Premier, and got a complimentary breakfast, although the coffee tasted a bit burnt.

We got an earlier train to Cologne than we originally thought we would, and could have (perhaps should have) done a cross-platform change on to the next train to Hamburg, but decided to have lunch first and catch a mid-afternoon train.Which was a little late starting off and got later and later - at its worst it was about 45 minutes late, but it did catch up a little of that and was only 30 minutes late at Hamburg.

We went to a restaurant across the road from the station (and, 

 incidentally, next door to the hotel where we will be staying on our way back through the town) and had a lovely dinner including our first beer of the holiday.

And then back to wait for our train, which has still not gone  anywhere! Oh well. I'll watch some videos while I still have a signal!

10 minutes later: Apparently the delay, sadly, due to someone's having died on the train between Berlin and here. Attendant said he thought it wouldn't be much longer. Anyway, we are comfortable!