Goodbye, Edinburgh!

We turned in early on our last night in Edinburgh (actually, we were exhausted early *every* night of our trip, but we purposely went to bed early on the last night) because we knew we had an early morning ahead. We woke up at 0300 so we could get ready, get checked out, get to the bus stop, and get to the airport in time for our 0630 flight.
It had been "fireworks night" on Thursday and on our way to the bus stop we passed lots of night owls in the streets.
We thought that the AirLink bus would leave at 0400, but it didn't leave until 0420, but it only took about 20 minutes to get to the airport, so we weren't feeling rushed. The bus was packed!
Our goal was to stay awake until we needed to board the flight, so we walked around in search of some breakfast. Look what we found:

A vending machine for books! In Okinawa, there were vending machines everywhere, but only for drinks.  Here, the vending machines are less plentiful, but I've seen them for candy and snacks as well as drinks (when I was here in 2000, there was a Hooch machine and a Grolsch machine in our hotel lobby!) But this was the first time anywhere that I'd seen a vending machine full of books! As luck would have it, it was out of order! That was actually a lucky thing because 1---the books were more expensive than typical vending machine fare and 2---I already had a book and a half left to read in my bag. If the book machine had been functioning, I don't know if I would've been able to resist getting a book just for the fun of getting it out of a vending machine!

We ended up having a "delicious" airport breakfast consisting of Cadbury chocolate and McCoy's crisps (chips). Once we boarded, I think we were both zonked out before take-off. We both slept through breakfast, and we both woke up right after the meals had been passed out. I would've rather slept for another 10 minutes so I wouldn't have known that I slept through an airplane meal. I think airplane food is fun!

Anyway, the great thing about the flight between London and Edinburgh is that, unlike the flight from Chicago to London (or especially, from Okinawa/Tokyo to Chicago!), when you wake up and check your watch, you're going to be landing in just 15 more minutes instead of 6 more hours. After we landed, we had a lot of time to wait in the airport for the shuttle back to base. D played with his PSP and I read my book. When we got on the bus, we tried to get comfortable enough to sleep just about the whole way back. I fell asleep to the sound of a retiree talking to this other lady and woke up to the same thing when we were just a couple miles from base. He seemed like a real sweetheart, but I was thankful that he hadn't chosen me to talk to because I really wanted more sleep! Edinburgh really knocked us out... we were asleep again for the night by about 8 or 9 pm!