We started our last day on our trip quite early as we would be traveling all day.
After having a nice breakfast at our hotel, everyone finished packing and headed onto our coach to take us to the airport in Edinburgh.
Once at the airport, we checked in, went through security fairly quickly, and waited around in the lounge until we were assigned a gate for our flight.
Something I have noticed on this trip is that airports in the United Kingdom and Scotland like to make you wait for your gate until around 20 minutes before you board. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it is just very different from how airports in the United States, and everywhere else I have been, like to manage.
Our flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow was very short. It was only about an hour long. We were actually early throughout our flight, but that backfired when we arrived at Heathrow early and they were not prepared for our flight to come in yet.
After waiting for about 15 minutes, we were able to get off the flight, check-in to our connecting flight to Pittsburgh, and head to the lounge to wait for our gate to be announced.
We had around a 3-hour layover in London, so we got lunch at Pret in the airport, and sat around in the lounge for a while.
Once they finally gave us our gate number, it came up on the screen that our flight was delayed 15 minutes, which was no big deal. However, after we walked to our gate, the flight listing on the screen had disappeared. This was when everyone, including other people on the flight, started to question what was actually going on.
Turns out, the airplane that had landed from Pittsburgh had difficulty connecting to the fire detector on the outside of the plane.
We sat around in our original gate for 45 minutes, watching our flight continue to be pushed back. Finally, our new gate was announced and we were only delayed about an hour at that point.
We were finally able to board the plane and we thought we would take off right away. Well, that was not the case. We sat on the plane for over an hour after boarding because the technicians were still working on fixing the technical issue.
By the time we took off, our flight had now been delayed over 2 hours, which wasn’t the worst situation to be in. They definitely could have canceled our flight or pushed it back even longer, so I am thankful that we were able to make it back home today.
This flight seemed to last a lot longer than our red-eye flight to London from Pittsburgh, probably because this flight was during the day and we weren’t sleeping the entire trip over. Plus, we had all of the delays and had been traveling since 10 that morning.
We finally landed in Pittsburgh around 9:40 pm, which was almost 3 am British time. We went through customs one last time and gathered our luggage.
Although this trip was a once in a lifetime experience and one of the most memorable trips I’ve been on, I was grateful to be back home and get back into a normal routine.