Trip Report! Day 3: London to Edinburgh

On Friday we got up bright and early and headed to King's Cross station to catch the train to Edinburgh.

Important Information! I did go look at Platform 9 3/4 but it wasn't very impressive. Plus there were already a bunch of nerds getting their picture taken there.

The trip to Edinburgh took about 5 hours. It was really interesting to see how the landscape changed as we went further north - we both thought southern England looked a lot like northwest Missouri, but it started getting hillier pretty quickly.

We stayed in the Blue Rainbow Aparthotel in Edinburgh. I booked it on Expedia and kept thinking, "surely they don't mean actual apartments," because the location was terrific - right in the center of town, and coincidentally only a couple of blocks from the rental car office - and it was very affordable. But then we got there and it turns out that yes, they were actual apartments. Very nice apartments, in fact. We kept opening more doors and being amazed at what we discovered.

A full kitchen! This blew my mind.

The bathroom was easily bigger than our entire London hotel room.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery was the view from our window.

We went to dinner at Henderson's, a well known vegetarian restaurant that has been around forever. The food definitely lived up to its reputation. Ben got an enormous stuffed crepe, and I got vegan haggis with neeps and tatties (turnips & potatoes), a standard Scottish thing. Well, usually the haggis is made of ground up sheep's organs, but in this case it was lentils & kidney beans. Very tasty. Not pictured, but we went back to the more casual half of the restaurant later for dessert as well.

It was starting to get dark, but we had some time to kill so we wandered around Old Town Edinburgh for a while to get a feel for the city. I'd been there once before, in 1998, and remember being extremely impressed - I had high expectations going in and the city easily exceeded them. I wasn't sure whether it would hold up going back, but it did. Edinburgh is just gorgeous. Ben was suitably impressed with it, as well.

Old Town Edinburgh was built up inside a medieval wall on top of a hill. The city has expanded around that area with time, but Old Town itself still sits above everything with gardens separating it from the newer part of the city.

We walked over to the hostel where I stayed with Becca in 1998 just to see if I would recognize it, and I did!

And this is the pub where we hung out as college students. Aw, memories. This pub is located in the Grassmarket area, which is lined with lots of pubs and restaurants dating back into the 1600s. It's so hard for me to try to wrap my head around the fact that those places have actually been there as long as 500 years. I had to constantly be reminding myself that Edinburgh is actually old, not just faked-to-look-old like things are in the United States.

We just had one night in Edinburgh at this point, because the next morning we picked up the car to set off into the Highlands!