Trip Report! Day 9: Glencoe to Edinburgh

The day when we had to return the car had finally dawned. Sadness. Even sadder, we woke up to rain again and therefore wouldn't be able to hike around in the mountainous area around Glencoe. Fortunately, Stirling Castle was on the way back to Edinburgh, so we decided to do that instead.

Stirling is a lot like Edinburgh Castle, in that it's basically a small city on a hill intended to secure an entire area. The views were amazing.

There were a lot of buildings and museums within the castle grounds to explore.

Ben couldn't even stand up in that thing. I guess olden times people really were smaller than us.

One of the big deals about Stirling is the recently remodeled, supposedly "authentically re-created" royal apartments, but we thought they were extremely cheesy. It was the only thing I saw in Scotland that had a Disneyland-like vibe and I thought I would find a lot of other negative opinions about it on the internet, but people seem to like it. Hmph. The tapestries were the only good part.

There were also a lot of gargoyle-type carvings lining the outside of the castle, which is apparently something it's famous for.

So then we set off to drive back to Edinburgh. Getting out of Stirling was crazy. The maps in guidebooks tend to have the city center only, so we had to just head in a general southward direction and hope for the best. We ended up going through at least six to eight roundabouts in quick succession - and these are not like wimpy American roundabouts, but are actually where huge, major roads come together and everyone is going a different direction and it's all crazy - and by some miracle we managed to find the M9 and get headed in the right direction toward Edinburgh.

Then, again, upon entering Edinburgh we had only a very basic idea of where to go. Edinburgh's city center is extremely congested and we were hitting just a bit before rush hour, so we were not super confident it was going to go well. By some miracle, though, Ben just kept driving and I would tell him to turn sometimes and then suddenly I looked up and we were three blocks from the car rental agency. Big sigh of relief.

We checked back into the Blue Rainbow Aparthotel. I LOVED this hotel. We were on the ground floor this time and had a nice view of the courtyard.

I kind of wanted to stay in and do laundry in the free facilities, but Ben made me go out and walk around and we ended up going for six miles before we crashed back at the hotel. Our first stop was Calton Hill, a park overlooking the city that is full of various monuments to one thing or another.

There is an old graveyard at the foot of the hill where David Hume is buried, but unfortunately his tomb was covered in scaffolding. Becca and I went here when we were in Edinburgh in 1998 and Hume's monument was about three times larger than I remembered. It kind of freaked me out that my memory was so inaccurate.

Then we walked over to Old Town and down the Royal Mile to Holyrood Palace. Holyrood is still the Queen's official residence in Scotland. There's a tour you can take, which I had done before, but we decided against it.

Instead, we decided to climb the big hill behind the palace. Ben made me take a "shortcut." I guess it was shorter, but that's only because it was straight up to the point where we had to use our hands sometimes.

You can see Edinburgh Castle directly above my head.

That evening, we got takeout from the more casual half of Henderson's and ate it in our lovely hotel apartment.

Then I stayed up until 11:30 doing laundry. I was VERY excited to be able to do laundry. Here it is, nicely folded in our second bedroom.