Scotland with Jim and Jenny, Post 2

Well, life is extremely frantic and Delle arrives in just 10 hours!!! :D However, I really need to finish telling you about our time in Scotland with Jim and Jenny, as we're about to launch into a new round of adventures and I'm already more than a month behind...

On Wednesday morning, we woke up in our bunk beds at the Chase the Wild Goose Hostel in Fort William, Scotland, and after breakfast and packing up the four of us set off in the car to the starting point of a wee 2.5 mile hike I'd planned through the Highlands. Well, it was beautiful!! We parked at Glenfinnan and walked up into the hills, first walking under and then looking down on the impressive Glenfinnan Viaduct, which as far as I could tell is not visible from any roads. Check out the photos below - recognise it? Yes, it is the very one from the Harry Potter movies!!



From the hills, we also had a beautiful view of Loch Shiel, beside which there is a monument to Bonnie Prince Charlie. And just after Ben, Jenny and I had rounded a hill and could no longer see the viaduct, a train came over it, which we'd lingered as long as possible for in the hope of seeing. So Jim was the only one to see that! The train then stopped for quite a while at the train station around the corner, so along with all the people from the train, we had a look around the station and listened to the busking bagpipe player. Then, we continued on with our walk and made it back to the car approximately 1.75 seconds before it started raining. :) A lovely morning!



Then, it was back into Fort William for a bit of lunch and shopping (I bought some very eye-catching gumboots) and on to Edinburgh. This was the first time Ben and I had seen Edinburgh in the daylight, and what we saw boded very well for what we would see when touring properly the next day. After checking into our hostel and having a bit of time there, we went to the evening meeting and met some lovely people there.

Later that night, Ben and I ventured out for some dinner, and ended up at a Nepalese restaurant where I had a very unfortunate encounter with a whole green chilli. This painful experience ended up involving a jug of water, four presumably-hysterical-behind-my-back young male waiters, and a bowl of yoghurt. Guess it livened up their night anyway!!!

The next day, Thursday, was the final day of our trip. We got going early and headed into the city centre for our full day of sightseeing on the open top buses. We got tickets that allowed us to travel on all four of the available bus routes, and set off first on the bus that would take us to the Ocean Terminal.

At the Ocean Terminal, we toured the Royal Yacht Britannia - yes, the Queen's own yacht!!! It was commissioned in 1954, and decommissioned in 1997 after logging over a million nautical miles and averaging one trip around the world for each of those years. The yacht has hosted four royal honeymoons - the third being Charles and Diana's in 1981, which was the first time a double bed was brought onto the yacht (see third photo below)!

Our tour was very interesting - we saw the separate bedrooms of the Queen and Prince Phillip (nowhere near as luxurious as you'd imagine - see the Queen's room in second photo below), a huge drawing room with lounge suites and a grand piano, many private family photos of the royals, the massive dining room where important (non-royal) functions are still regularly held (see panorama), and the pristine engine room.

We had audio guides to listen to as we walked around, and they even told us about amusing traditions of the ship's officers, such as playing tennis (first shot into the ceiling fan) with a one-eyed stuffed wombat (see photo of the real thing below). I definitely recommend a tour of Britannia if you're ever in Edinburgh!



After that, we rode around on the buses, seeing varous sites of great importance (such as the cafe where JK Rowling started her writing), and then Jim and Jenny disembarked near Hollyrood Palace and Parliament House while Ben and I went to the Royal Mile and just wandered around.

The Royal Mile is a fabulous old street where there are many attractions, shops etc - very touristy but that's able to be overlooked since the location is so awesome!! We had a delicious lunch and in the evening we met up with Jim and Jenny again for our tour of Mary King's Close...

This is a fascinating and unique aspect to Edinburgh: until the mid 1700s, Mary King's Close was a lively thoroughfare of pubs, shops and residences (for fairly poor families it seems) on Edinburgh's High Street. Then, around the middle of the 18th century, the city needed a spot to build its council chambers, so it simply lopped off the top storeys of the buildings lining the narrow close (I think we were told they were up to 13 storeys high originally) and plonked the council chambers on top on this convenient foundation!!!

Mary King's Close was therefore underground, deserted, and forgotten about for a few hundred years. In 2003, it was opened up as a tourist attraction, and so it's this underground street and the now-empty bottom storey rooms that we explored in the pitch dark with the aid of an entertaining tour guide who pretended she was actually from the 1700s and kept trying to scare us. Good fun and certainly a very interesting tour!

After this tour, it was off to the airport in a screaming hurry, where we only made our flight home because (a) they reopened the just-closed check-in for us, and (b) our flight was delayed by over an hour anyway. :)

That day our opinion of Edinburgh rose to such heights that Ben and I declared it our favourite city in the UK - yes, better than Cambridge, which had toppled Bath from first place and seemed impossible to beat. Edinburgh is just so old and amazing and interesting - words can't describe it and nor can my photos adequately capture it! Perhaps some might not like it because it is so, well, brown, but I think it's beautiful. What a fabulous city!!! Here are a few miscellaneous photos taken throughout the day...



Goodnight! PS. Now it's 8 hours until Delle arrives!!!!