12 July, 2007

Our first day as total tourists! We didn't really have a plan - I knew the things that we HAD to see and it was really up in the air. We ate breakfast at the hostel (of course, A. won't eat cereal, so she'll be awfully hungry later on), then walked up the million steps to the top of the Royal Mile (can I just say that I was SO happy I'd been working on squats with heavy weights - I could fel my legs, but they weren't sore. A.'s were very sore and tired). I had decided to do a bus tour first, but as we got to the top of the steps, there were so many people going towards the castle that I changed my mind and we went to the castle instead!

The weather was nice - on the cool side and cloudy, but at least it wasn't raining!

On the bridge to the castle

We met up with a tour that was just getting started. Our guide, Nigel, brought us to all the main sites in the castle grounds and delved into the history of the castle.

It is built on a huge chunck of volcanic rock and has never been penetrated during a battle.

There are currently troops that still live and work there. They discovered the timbered ceiling of the Great Hall I believe during the Victorian Era - it looks the the hull of a ship turned upside down. (Ona asidenote - Meredith Viera interview JK Rowling in the Great Hall of the Castle ~10 days after we were there!).

Inside the Great Hall

We were just in time to see a performance in the Great Hall of two Jacobite soldiers - they did a reenactment of what the soldiers would have worn, their weapons and how they fought, plus described the battles they fought in.

After the re-enactment, we toured some more buildings and saw the Crown Jewels of Scotland (no pictures allowed!). The following pictures are the view of Edinburgh from the Castle.

The water is the Firth of Forth and land beyond the water is the kingdom of Fife

Arthur's Seat as seen from the Castle

The wonderful Scots love their dogs as much as I love mine and they have graveyard for the dogs of the soldiers at the Castle.

We ate lunch at the Castle, wrote some postcards and were just in time to see the One o'clock gun fire - they fire it daily at 1:00 p.m. as a time signal to the boats on the Firth of Forth. The name of the gun is the Mons Meg.

Me without a hairdryer - our roomates with the adaptor that worked had already left that morning!

A. outside the Castle!

After the castle, we wandered down the Royal Mile, stopping in shops, buying souveniers and postcards.

We made it to the bottom of the Royal Mile and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which is the Queen's official residence when in Scotland. We opted to not do the tour (OK - I was being cheap, but there are only so many tours one can do in a day!) and just took pictures through thte fence with the Japanese tourists!

A rock at the palce of Holyroodhouse that looks like Pumba!

After walking around a bit at the Palce, we were getting tired and hungry and headed back up the Royal Mile (did I mention it was all downhill on the way there? That means it was all uphill on the way home!) We walked and walked and walked. We decided to find a grocery store and after more walking, we finally located it. We got some groceries that we could take with us and would be ok wothout a refrigerator and some frozen pizzas for dinner. We made it back to the Royal Mile, but by this time we were really tired and had bags of groceries and souveniers so we found a cab to take us back to the hostel. We made pizza, had lemonade (it's fizzy!) and basically chilled out til time for bed. I gave A. her travel journal and while reading it, she found out we were going to Paris. Boy was she surprised! We had some new roomates that night - 2 nice Australian girls - one was a runner who was doing races throught the UK, the other was living in London and was just travelling with for fun. They invited us out to the pub crawl, but we were tired (not to mention that A. is only 16), so it was early to bed!