By Lucy

Days in England: 14

We both woke up around 6 on our last day. Oddly, to me at least, there are very few places open before 10 AM around “downtown” Edinburgh. It was clear but bitterly cold, and we walked more than half an hour to find a place – not that the food was bad, but for the price and the walk in hindsight I’d have waited for breakfast to be served at the hostel.

We caught the tram back to the hostel, hung out for a bit, showered and sorted out our bags, since we technically had to check out by 11. The hostel let us store our bags in the luggage room until we had to leave that night, then we hopped on the tram to the Zoo.

The zoo was the zoo, if you like going to zoos. I will say, I know Edinburgh is hilly but the degree of incline the zoo is built on is insane! If you go to the Edinburgh zoo be ready for a hike! Spectacular view of the city, though.

We stopped to get some pho for lunch, then we still had time to kill until our bus at… 11:30 PM.

I slammed on the breaks there. Getting the night bus had seemed like a good idea when there had still been a chance we could sleep on the bus. But I was still tired and recovering from my flu, and had established to my satisfaction that I can’t sleep on vehicles. We wouldn’t get home til sometime after 9AM, and Rich had work at 1:30PM (and he insists he wasn’t overstretching himself in any way). I insisted we go to the train station and get home faster. We got a ticket for 6:30PM, which would get us home between 1 and 2 AM.

With a little bit of time to kill, we went back to the Edinburgh museum and walked around the exhibits we hadn’t seen the other day.

At 6 o’clock we went back to the hostel for ours bags, then one last time down Cockburn Road to the train station. The train journey was uneventful, then I crawled into bed and didn’t get out until Saturday. I was beyond wiped out!