Continuing their grand tour of Europe, Jimmy discovers that priority booking can be worth the extra bucks, but there’s no guarantee the trains will be there when you land.

It doesn’t matter how much you pay or how well you plan, there’s a point in every overseas holiday where everything falls apart.

I am not a fan of Britain’s (and Ireland’s) cheapo airlines. EasyJet left me stranded in Glasgow once and then compounded it by repeating the trick when I had taken a 4am bus trip to Edinburgh the next day to get an alternative flight to Paris to pick up my flight back home to Sydney.

Meanwhile, Ryanair has one of the worst reputations for customer service of any airline. Some might call their charges for normal baggage opportunistic. Others say they are predatory. After all, this is the airline that once toyed with the idea of “standing” seats for short flights and, rumour had it, forcing passengers to pay for using the toilets.

The real problem is that they operate like mobile phone companies – offering complicated packages so that it feels like the only way you know for sure that you’re going to get what you want is to buy everything

So that’s what I did for our flight from Berlin to London. If I paid for priority boarding and seat selection, I got a free check-in baggage allowance and extra carry-on bag. Or something. Maybe there was a snack involved, too.

I thought the priority boarding thing was probably a scam until we got to the airport and were hustled past long lines of irritated and anxious travellers, some doing the desperate repacking shuffle to avoid extortionate excess baggage fees.

But not us. We glided past to the fast-track check-ins, bag drops and security queues like royalty. So far, so good.

We landed at Stansted – which appears to be Ryanair’s UK hub – and were feeling so seasoned as travellers that we pre-booked our tickets for the train to London – one of those stations on the Monopoly board and just two tube stops from our hotel.

Our smug smiles evaporated when we disembarked and realised the Stansted line was closed for maintenance and our train would take us north to Cambridge before we’d get on another going south to King’s Cross, half a city away from our digs (CitizenM Tower of London, if you must know). We should have waited till we got off and bought an express bus ticket for less money and hassle.

To make matters worse, we had a long-standing dinner date with a dear friend that we’d arranged thinking we’d have hours to spare. By the time we’d done the Cambridge cha-cha and tried to get an Uber because “the Tube would be too much hassle” – another faux pas – we were nearly an hour late.

We only had two nights in London before we were heading off to Southampton then Glasgow, where there was material in universities in both cities that Sue needed to read as research for her next book, partly about the Duke of Wellington.

Southampton University library has all the Wellington papers stored there. We were only allowed to read 10 documents each – there are hundreds of thousands of items – but it is kind of thrilling to hold a congratulatory letter from a European prince to Wellington, knowing that both had also held the same piece of paper at some time.

Just as an aside, a research side-trip to the British Library led to us looking for somewhere that serves vegetarian food near Kings Cross station.

Now, Spagnoletti is no one’s idea of a vego restaurant – suckling pig and veal are a bit of a giveaway – but the meat-free food was superb, even if it did come in small doses with typically inflated British prices.

The trip to Southampton required a short tube ride to Waterloo station (surely a good omen in this Wellington-related trip) followed by a train ride to the south-western city.

Travel Tip: The London Underground map is a visual depiction of connections, not distances.

After our shenanigans at Kings Cross trying to get an Uber to Tower Hill, I decided we should take the Tube to Waterloo. It involved a short ride to Embankment where there was a connection to the Northern Line and Waterloo.

The only problem was it was rush hour and that “connection” required a 10-minute forced march up and down way too many stairs with all our luggage for four weeks, plus our travelling offices.

The train to Southampton was a breeze with comfy seats and tables to work on, and the city has a free bus service that transports students around town and allows the uneducated to use it, too. The only downside, if it is one, seems to be that every bus goes through the university campus at some point.

I had spent hours trying to work out the combination of trains and planes that would get us from Southampton to Glasgow cheaply and efficiently and, hitting our old friend Google, had found out to my astonishment there were two direct flights leaving that day.

How could this be? And the answer is cruise ships – Weegies (Glaswegians) love a cruise. And Southampton is the UK’s main embarkation port for such excursions.

Apart from a kerfuffle over checking in my carry-on bag as hold luggage – the self-service scales that normally cause palpitations for travellers who have calculated the weight in their bags to the last gram – said it was too light rather than too heavy.

As a result, I had to queue again and then go and press a buzzer on the wall and wait at a door marked “oversized baggage”. We got on the plane and had a fast and uneventful flight to Glasgow. But I still think EasyJet’s logo should have quotes around the “Easy”.

Next time: Curry in a hurry and mental rental cars