Headed home: Tuesday

I woke up from an extraordinarily uncomfortable sleep to find we were in London. Chad and I had taken the overnight bus, hence the reason sleep was so uncomfortable. We were in the upper deck of the coach (first time I had run across that combination), so we had a nice view of the London streets as we went through them, on our way to Victoria station.
We had breakfast in the train station, bought a final round of chocolates, and took the train to Gatwick. We were really early for our flight, so we had plenty of time to read the paper, or in Chad's case, to solve the Sudoku puzzles in the paper. It did take a long time to get through security, but we had expected that. The Gatwick airport is set up with a huge waiting area, surrounded by corridors to the various gates, with shops all around the sides. Passengers wait here until their flight shows up on the screen, then they go to their gates and wait. In some ways, I like it better than the system at, say, DFW or Houston, because all the shops are together in the spot you are waiting in, anyway, and there's no need to trek halfway across the airport from your gate just to find the McDonalds you were looking for.
So the flight back to Houston was 10 hours long, which I was not expecting-- apparently it's longer because of the jetstreams or something. Whatever it was, it was longer going back than coming, but it wasn't bad. The flight was actually quite empty, the flight attendents were fantastic, and the inflight entertainment kept me pretty well entertained.
Once through customs in Houston, when were were waiting for our flight to Lubbock, I was plagued by my age-old problem; my brain can only handle one accent at once. With my ears still ringing with Scottish, and English, accents, I had a hard time understanding the Americans around me. It's not so much that they sounded strange (although they did), it's just that I was expecting their words to sound differently. In any case, I did my best to shut them out. We got our flight back, a cab home, and I went straight to bed.