On the way we passed the Scott Monument, which is very impressive. It stands along Princes Street, which is sort of the border between Old Town and New Town. (New Town is not actually very new, having been built in the late 1700's, but I guess it's new when you consider that people have been living in the Old Town part since at least the Bronze Age).
Edinburgh Castle is, like Stirling, a small city enclosed in walls with amazing views of the surrounding areas.
The oldest building on the grounds is St. Margaret's Chapel, which dates to the 1100's. Almost a thousand years old!
Edinburgh Castle is, like Stirling, a small city enclosed in walls with amazing views of the surrounding areas.
The oldest building on the grounds is St. Margaret's Chapel, which dates to the 1100's. Almost a thousand years old!
The castle sits at the top of the Royal Mile, at the other end of which is Holyrood Palace (and the modern Scottish Parliament building). The Royal Mile is where we spent most of the day, wandering around and seeing the sights. It is all very old.
St. Giles Cathedral is about halfway down.
You were supposed to pay 2 pounds for a photography permit, but I'm bad and just snuck pictures anyway.
It was a very warm and sunny day. Ben got mad at me for taking this picture. Classin' it up in the NASA cap.
Further down the Royal Mile.
We stopped for lunch at Maxie's, a restaurant overlooking this winding street that leads down into the Grassmarket (a pub district today, but they used to sell cows and execute people there). We initially got a table on the patio but it was too hot, plus there was an extremely loud woman at the table next to us. So we went inside.
The interior was awesome. Again I had to remind myself that this building is genuinely old, not fake American old.
We got deep fried brie. Imagine how awesome you think deep fried brie might be, and that is exactly how awesome it was.
Then we wandered down to the Grassmarket, via a street that went behind the castle. From this view the natural rock hill was pretty impressive.
This is across the street from the castle. Yuck.
We popped in to the free National Museum of Scotland just because it was there. The interior was unexpected! Outside it looks like any other standard medieval stone building. The museum itself was a pretty strange collection of science and history and culture stuff from all over the world.
On the way back to the hotel we passed the cafe where JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books!
And then we spent a couple of hours relaxing before dinner at David Bann, which was really our only splurgey meal of the trip. It was worth it! Their smoked tofu was amazing.
Ben got a beet & blue cheese souffle and reported that it was great as well.
The next morning, we got up and took the train back to London, then had a grueling hour-long tube ride to Heathrow, then had a comedy-of-errors type situation in which none of the bus drivers knew where our hotel was, but finally we arrived at the Park Inn Heathrow for our last night in the UK. The hotel was nothing special, just your average airport hotel, but it did have air conditioning which was a blessing since it was unseasonably hot in England. The next morning we took a bus to the airport and flew back to Raleigh and that was that!
THE END!
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