People Underestimate the Value of a Good Ramble

Thursday, May 29, 2014

The UK Trip: Edinburgh Castle Or Bust

In case you missed them...here's Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5 and Part 6.

So this is the 7th installment, it's taken me over 4 months, and I'm still only talking about Wednesday the 15th.  I have seven more days to recount. Hopefully, I'll live long enough to finish.

We left lovely, peaceful Lanercost and headed up to Edinburgh. We had wavered about whether to go to Glasgow or Edinburgh or somehow both places, but in the time we had it was better to just choose one. During the planning phase, I had found an interesting place to stay in Glasgow and there was a music festival or something going on, but the castle was in Edinburgh.  As it turned out at this point we felt we'd made the right decision, cause we really hadn't seen one castle up close yet. 

But I was really feeling sick that day, plus it was getting colder and damper as we headed North. By the time we got there it was getting on to late afternoon and we had to drive through the city to get to our B&B; the roads were kinda scary and the traffic was backed up and slow going. 




We finally got there and it wasn't so great.  I mean, it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't anything special either. I admit that the entire experience was somewhat colored by the fact that I was feeling ill. But we got checked in and then ran out, got a taxi and traveled across town to the castle.  It was late, but the castle was still open for a couple of hours so we figured we'd have time.



The taxi could only take us to a point off to the side and somewhere down the Royal Mile from the castle. So we started walking...uphill. I could barely breathe and I was not too happy.  We got all the way up there and were just approaching the entrance when they pulled the rope over and told us that the castle was closed for the day.  WHAT??  Ugh!  So just one more castle we didn't get to see. Even worse, they weren't even nice about it. I guess they see lots of people a day, but they could at least have seemed to care about the fact that we had traveled all that way and had to leave in the morning without getting to see the castle. 




We walked back down to the main road and found a place to eat.  It wasn't too nice, but I was about done.  Jeff finally got to try haggis, though, so that was a plus. I wasn't in the mood for anything that interesting. Honestly, all I wanted was a nice cuppa. 



We grabbed a taxi back to the room and even though it was only about 8 pm, I went right to bed.  Jeff went back out to try find something, anything, to do, but it started raining so he just came back and went to bed himself. 

As you can probably tell, Edinburgh was not our favorite place. But it gets better, cause in the morning we left. 



We traveled South down the east coast of Scotland and it was a beautiful day. The views alone made up for how bad the day before had been.





Next up....Durham 

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