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I woke up Friday morning to the sound of my phone beeping and Dad's frantic voice. Dad was trying to tell me that my flight had been cancelled and we needed to reschedule asap. I will admit that I initially thought he was joking. Then I checked my phone. Christine had sent me a message asking if I’d heard our flight was cancelled. I had three missed calls and three new messages all from Mom and Dad. Unbelievable, my flight was cancelled. Dad and I rescheduled for the 5:05 p.m. (as opposed to the original 7:55) flight. Turns out that my original flight was supposed to fly out of London to Chicago then complete the trip with me on it. However, London had just received a snowstorm worse than had happened in 18 years and the plane was unable to take off.

After seeing Mom off and several hugs later, Dad and I took off. It was an easy drive and I even got a nap in. We decided to get lunch at Denny’s, as they serve delicious breakfast. It was my second breakfast of the day. If you’re ever going up to O’Hare and need to eat, don’t drive there first. We had to loop around the arrival gates and head out down the road to get food. Oh well…

The airport was pretty uneventful. Dad checked out the bookstore while I waited for Christine to show up. Plus, we switched batteries on our phones! When Christine let me know that she was at our gate, Dad and I said goodbye and I went through security flashing my Holt Farms tee to everybody in line!

The flight was easy enough. I had an aisle seat next to Christine (on the other aisle) and a young (attractive) Roman woman who spoke very little English. Each seat in coach had an individual screen in it with a wide selection of movies, TV, music, and information. I watched Burn After Reading, which wasn’t great, and Body of Lies, which was very good.

We were served two meals on the flight. For dinner I chose chicken and pasta. It was a little bit weird, but the salad was tasty. (Romaine lettuce, raisins, feta cheese, & balsamic vinegar.) On the plus side, the wine was free! Breakfast was a crappy apple bear claw with OJ.

It should be noted that all the flight attendants were very good looking. It must be a good job here because even on the flight to Edinburgh, they were friendly!

Sleep was impossible on the flight because it was so early in the night. We arrived in Heathrow around midnight!

Heathrow was a great looking airport—very nice and new. All the walls were transparent glass which gave us a good look at the baggage handling machines. We had to go through British security, which seemed a little ridiculous to me. Why would we need to go through it again? The inside of the airport looked quite a bit like a big football stadium with a three story building inside of it.

In customs we heard a girl in front of us saying she was also going to Stirling. I was a bit upset at her for wearing a Wisconsin hoodie a day after they had beaten the Illini. We were about to say hi when we were called up to the desk. By the time we were done, she was gone. We looked around the airport for her, but we weren't able to find her until we were boarding our flight. We found out her name was Annelise, and we had a good chat in line. Unfortunately, we weren't sitting by each other on the plane.

The plane wasn't nearly as new as the one from Chicago, but we made it to Glasgow in about an hour or so. I didn't get more than 5 min of sleep on the flight so I was exhausted by the end!

Glasgow airport was a small place that almost reminded me of the Quad City Airport, except that it was a bit dingier. We arrived at 1:15 p.m. local time and Christine and I thought that our shuttle was supposed to pick us up at 3. Annelise told us that she had received an email telling her the shuttle had been moved to 1:00 p.m. so for quite a while we were scared that we had missed the shuttle. We had even started looking into how to get to Stirling using busses and trains…

While we were waiting around the airport, we started talking to other people who looked like students. Turns out they were also waiting for the shuttle and were going to Stirling Uni as well. (One of these people actually ended up being a flat-mate of mine.) Two of them were from Europe (German & France) and there was another girl from the states as well. The shuttle finally arrived at about 5 till 3, to our great relief! However, Christine was quite concerned because two other girls from U of I were supposed to be on our flight from London to Glasgow and hadn't shown up yet. We waited around for them for 30 minutes or so and then finally decided to leave.

I tried to stay awake for the bus trip, but I fell asleep almost instantly. I think it took 45 min to an hour to get to Stirling from the airport. When I woke up, I was looking up at Stirling Castle! It was a pretty different sight from the flatlands of Illinois!

At this point all of the American students had been up for around 24+ hours, but it was still too early Stirling time to go to bed. We decided to take a couple hours in our rooms to get settled in and get a shower, then meet up again for a dinner.

After an s. s. & s., I felt much better about myself. We took the bus down to Stirling’s City Center (Murray Place… it sounds like “Merry place” to me...) and decided on an Indian restaurant that had been recommended by a local. It was quite delicious and they had some of the best service I'd ever seen. (Took off the ladies’ jackets, did a fancy thing with our napkins for us, good food & drink service, and hot towels at the end!) I don’t feel as bad for Brian, as I now know Indian food can be quite tasty. At the end of dinner, the Americans calculated we’d been awake for 32 hours and decided that we needed to get some sleep.

That’s the end of this edition of the blog.

McCann: No idea… less though.