Getting to Prestwick Airport (Amazing Race part 2)

So, do you remember the grand adventure that getting to Scotland was? Getting back was just as intense. In fact, it was so intense that I have to divide it up into two parts.

Our flight left Prestwick at 6:40am on Tuesday morning, so we decided to go out the night before and stay in a hostel. Alex, Sam and I left Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh around 9:30pm. We took the bus downtown to the train station, which took about 45 minutes. When we got there, we (obviously) went to the desk to purchase train tickets. The guy there tells us "There's a train that leaves here at 11pm and goes to Glasgow Queen Street...the train to Prestwick leaves from Glasgow Central though, and if your train gets there on time you'll have about 12 minutes to get from one station to the other, but it's about a five minute walk, so you can go ahead and do that" Okay great! we think, and we buy our tickets (just to Glasgow Queen Street, on the off-chance that we miss the next train). Alex and I say our goodbyes to Sam, and get on the train.

It ends up getting to Queen Street about 2 minutes late, which means we have ten minutes to get across town to the other train station. No biggie, we'll just walk faster. What we failed to consider was that the directions we were given consisted of "turn right, walk down a few streets and turn left, and then turn right again and it's right there." Glasgow is the CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND. Directions like that don't work! To make matters worse, it was raining. So the scene ended up like this: after realizing that our directions lead us to essentially anywhere, Alex and I started running toward where we thought the station might be, stopping periodically to ask people, all of whom were friendly, but all of whom gave us different directions to the station. Once we finally got something clear and simple, we booked it as fast as we could to the road where the station was (so fast that even a man on the street begging for money said he understood when we said we didn't have time to stop and give him change). We also stopped to take this picture:

A statue with a traffic cone on its head

When we got to the street where the station was supposed to be, we were expecting something kind of obvious...I mean, it is the main train station of the capital of Scotland and all...but nope, we didn't see anything. It's about 12:13am at this point, which meant that we would have two minutes to get to the train station and on the train. Kind of hard when you can't even see the station. We were about to just take the financial hit and hail a taxi when--oh hey there's the train station tucked into a wall over there!! So we sprinted over there, hoping beyond all reason that the train was still there. When we got there, we had just enough time to see what platform the train was on before the sign for it disappeared (implying that it left). Well, we might as well jog over and make sure, we figured. Somewhat disheartened, we made our way over to platform 12 to find that HOLY COW THE TRAIN IS STILL THERE DID THEY JUST BLOW THE WHISTLE? WE NEED TO RUN. I have never run so fast with a heavy bag in my life. We waved frantically at the guy working on the platform, and he looked at us like "Seriously ladies? What do you think I'm going to do, stop the train with my bare hands?"

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We got on the train. The train was in motion before we even managed to sit down, but we made it. Breathlessly, we bought tickets from the lady working on the train, and celebrated our epic victory. I was so thrilled that I even called my mom.

Success! Here we are, sweaty and glorious, with our hard-won tickets

Victoriously calling my mom

The train stopped in Prestwick Town, and we got off (or in Scottish terms, we "alit" from the train. That sounds so much fancier). The "train station" was basically a platform and...well, it was just a platform. Surrounded by nothing. So here's me and Alex, pretty much all alone on this platform at one in the morning in some random town in Scotland. The only other people there were two guys that got off the train when we did. So, without any other options, we asked them if they lived in Prestwick. Fortunately, they did. So we ask, "Can you help us find a taxi?" to which they reply "Ah...hmm...*Scottish incoherence* follow us!" Well, okay. So we follow these gentlemen down some road, around a corner, around another corner, etc...I guess I must have been pretty tired, because I didn't think anything of the fact that we were following strangers around in the middle of the night. We came to this building, they open the door and shout in "ey we got some lassies that want a car!" to which there was some murmured response, and we were instructed to go into the building. It was really just a shady little room with a guy behind a desk...but what else were we going to do? "A car will be here in about 5 minutes" he tells us.

Sure enough, about 5 minutes later two legitimate taxis show up. We get in to continue on to our hostel, and I will finish this story later.