A three day weekend calls for a new destination. We jumped on the train and headed north on Friday to Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s about a 5 hour journey by train so not too bad of a trip. The journey started off just fine. We had dinner and Brady was contently watching movies on the iPad. I decided it would be nice to have a glass of wine to kick of our holiday weekend. All was going well until I decided to reach across the table and knocked the entire full glass on my new shirt. I was completely drenched and my luck it was red wine. On the plus side, if I was on a plane I would have had to sit in my drenched clothes until the plane landed. However, since we were on a train, my bag was conveniently just a few rows away from me and I had an extra set of clothes to change into. Bonus, when we got to Scotland we bought some stain remover and was able to get the stain out.
Edinburgh is a beautiful city with scenic views. One thing that I thought was neat is the different elevations. As you walk down the streets there are various alleys and staircases that will take you to an entirely different area that’s either below or above where you are walking at. Like all good UK cities, there of course were castles, numerous churches and museums. Saturday wasn’t great weather, but it was tolerable. It was in the low 50s so fairly cool for late May, but the more annoying part was that the sun would be out and it was start raining, then the sun would go behind the clouds and it would get really cool. It did this on and off all day.
On Saturday, we walked the Royal Mile, took pictures of the Scotland Castle and of Holyrood, which is one of the Queen’s official residences . We keep things pretty low-key and decided not to do all of the touristy activities and just took some pictures from outside. At this point, we’ve decided we have seen the interiors of enough castles to last a few years at least. I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that the castle has some very nice tapestries, over sized furniture and art work.
Brady has done a lot of traveling since we’ve moved to the UK and while he is always a good sport it hasn’t always been full of kid activities. This weekend we kept asking him what HE wanted to do. His typical response is “kid things”. When we asked him what kind of ‘kid things’ he had in mind he said he wanted to go to a park. Before lunch on Saturday we stopped and visited our first park of the weekend. (many more parks to come) It started raining so I voted that we go for some indoor shopping.
On Sunday we wanted to go down by the coast. We could see it from our hotel, but it was a good 3 mile walk away. I wish I could say that we had a lovely walk down to the water, however we were walking in 50+ mile an hour wind gusts with sand and dirt hitting us in the face. It wasn’t all a waste, but the walk in itself was a little miserable. At one point we were both stopped in our tracks by an extremely strong wind gust. Scotland is known for being windy and Sunday just happened to be an EXTREMELY windy day. We did make it down to the water and saw her Majesty's boat Britannia, which was a royal yacht that was used for 696 foreign visits. On a positive note, I spotted a nice mall which we were able to spend some quality time enjoying. Inside the mall they had a huge kid play zone place that you could pay to go to. Brady was quick to spot it and reminded us that we needed to do ‘kid things’ so we checked it out and he had a great time. Despite the horrible winds we went ahead and walked back. On our walk back we found a couple more parks to continue on with the ‘kid things’ theme.
Monday morning we had a nice big breakfast, enjoyed some Starbucks and set back for our London home. We were a bit nervous about 1 hour into the train journey as our train was having 'break issues', but the train recovered and we were only about 10 mins delayed.
Last but not least, Brady enjoying some quality iPad time in the hotel. I'm pretty sure I need another one as he thinks he owns this one.
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