Our final few days of life on the continent came and went without too many remarkable moments. The weather was fairly poor for most of the time, we were tired, and less than impressed with our accommodations, so it was hard to get excited about the whole Prague experience. Had we gone there first, I’m sure we would have had a much different impression. It certainly is old and has lots of beautiful/interesting buildings … just make sure that you pick some better accommodation than we did!
We flew from Prague to Edinburgh via Gatwick (London) without any troubles — British Airlines was a pleasant change from the usual discount airlines that we had been dealing with. The only minor problem was that I had booked our flights with the credit card that we lost along the way … only took a few minutes to get that straightened out.
Back in Edinburgh, things felt very familiar … our few days there earlier in the trip helped us out. It was good to see family again. The city was cool but crowded, with the very large Edinburgh Festival going on. We took it easy for a few days, picking up some souvenirs along the way and getting in a bit more pub food. We did manage to take in a big soccer game too — one of Edinburgh’s teams was playing against a team from Athens, Greece in a qualifier for the European Championship. Unfortunately the home team shat the bed, so to speak, giving up two goals in the last three minutes to lose the game. The crowd was pretty excited up until that point, and it was fun to enjoy some good live sports.
After wandering the city on our last full day abroad, we returned to my brother’s apartment to find out about all of the terrorism-related arrests that had been made in England earlier in the day, and that flights everywhere were messed up. We weren’t too certain what this was all going to mean for us, but, it seemed that the worst was happening for flights from England to the US — we were flying from Scotland to Canada, so, things should be okay. As it turned out, they were — we weren’t allowed to bring anything with us on the plane … no water, no reading materials, no camera/film … nothing. That was a bit of an inconvenience in some respects, but, it felt quite liberating to be able to walk around an airport without all sorts of bags weighing us down.
Our timing was pretty remarkable all in all. We flew through London two days before the big day, and then one day after. Had our timing been a bit different, at the very least, we would have been stranded in an airport for a long time, and possibly could have missed all of our non-refundable flights. It could have been ugly, but it worked out well for us.
Before we knew it, our six-hour flight to Toronto was finished, and eventually we made it back to Athens safe and sound. Over. Finished.
Done.