The flight was uneventful and smooth (which is high praise from a girl that doesn't like to fly), though uncomfortable. Dinner was tasty and service impeccable. While sleeping on airplanes has always been difficult, this one in particular was tough because of a new pain that I've not had to deal with when flying before. I guess it's sciatic, but not sure. What I am sure of is that it cause sitting to be very painful. Period. But, what do you do on an airplane? You sit. And sit. And sit some more. When I could, I would stand up and walk in place or at least bend enough to get some movement in my hip. Movement seemed to help a bit.
Finally, we arrive in London and then I got all (and more) the movement I could want! We walked, and walked and walked some more only to find out we had more walking to do to get to customs. BTW, London has this customs thing organized! The line was long, but it still only took about 20 minutes to get through it.
We then walked some more to get to baggage and out to locate our driver, ready to take us to the city and train station. This ride is normally about 45 minutes, except during the morning work commute. Monday, it took almost 90 minutes and yes, we did miss our scheduled train. However, in 10 minutes there is another one leaving for Edinburgh. Thinking we'd miss it and have to wait longer, we get in line to exchange our tickets and the agent just asked why we missed our scheduled one, added a statement to our tickets and sent us to get on the one leaving (at this point) in less than 5 minutes. We made it!
Wow. What a day already, right? It gets better. The train departs, on time, and we settle in for the next 5 hours. We'd both like to nap a little, but it proves almost as uncomfortable as the airplane. Though we doze a little, we can't sleep. Then about 2 1/2 hours into the journey, something magical happens: the terrain changes from flat farmland to rolling hills and lakes and then coastline with little villages dotting along and golf courses that reach right to cliff edges. Train bridges that are storybook beautiful and architecture straight out of Robin Hood stories.
That last 90 minutes of the ride was the best 90 minutes of the entire travel experience to get to Edinburgh! And yes, I'd go through all of the discomfort to see those sights again!
Here is a little taste of what we had the opportunity to see (which we wouldn't have seen had we taken a puddle-jumper flight from London-Edinburgh).
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