Edinburgh, Scotland

I'm finally tackling our Scotland pictures. I'm going to split them up in posts by days/location, as I think that will be the easiest.

We flew in to Edinburgh on Sunday and were able to do an early check-in at the hotel around noon. That gave us most of the day on Sunday to explore. We walked the Magnificient Mile (which our hotel was directly on), ate at a Hog cafe (which was recommended in our Frommer's book), toured an old church, did a Scotch Whisky Tour and toured Edinburgh Castle. Sunday was super busy, but fun.

 The hog sandwich place was amazing. It was off the mile a block or so and was lined with people. They had about six seats in the whole place. Super cheap and delicious. We were both glad that we decided to try it.

The Scotch tour was definitely a good one. It gave us an introductory in to making scotch and we had a tasting at the end. It's definitely not to my liking, but Luke likes it. 

 

 

 This was the church that we went it. I can't remember the history behind it, but it's super old. lol

 This is a picture of Edinburgh Castle from the shopping district. We spent about 2 hours at Edinburgh Castle and enjoyed it. Looking back over the trip, this was our least favorite castle.

On to Day 2 in Edinburgh:

We visited the Palace of Holyroodhouse first thing. It is where the Queen and Royal family stay when they are in Scotland. 

We both really liked the Palace. The whole thing (well, the parts you could walk through), had original furnishing and lots of plaques to read. Very informative and just plain neat. 

The above and below pictures are part of the Palace. Where we are standing there used to be an Abbey before the Palace was built.

After that we grabbed a strawberry shortbread creme filled sconce (the best I've ever had) and decided to climb Arthur's Seat. It was supposed to have the best views of Edinburgh. 

 The above picture shows Arthur's Seat (or what we thought it was). Funny thing... we climbed that and I huffed and puffed the whole way. Some other people were climbing it as well, but there was a bigger mountain thing right behind it too. Well, there were lots of people on that one. We didn't figure out till we went back to the hotel, that the bigger one was Arthur's Seat. I would have never made it on the actual one. Climbing is just not my thing.

View from the top.

After climbing, we headed back in to the newer part of town. We hit up a coffee shop, restaurant and some stores. Frommer's had recommended Paper Source and Tiger Lily as cool shops and I loved them both. 

That pretty much concluded our time in Edinburgh.