Julie and her friend Jennifer were supposed to arrive from Canada, via Amsterdam, at around 10:30, but Canada was having some really bad weather, and their first flight was late in departing. Almost as soon as I arrived in Edinburgh, I received a message from Frank, Julie's husband, telling that they missed their connecting flight in Amsterdam and wouldn't be arriving until around 1:30 pm. Och aye!
I was faced with a choice of either trying to get transportation to the hostel we were staying at or waiting at the airport for another 3 hours. I got information from one of the service reps at the desk, on the best way to get to the hostel. I was trying to remember an e-mail that Julie had sent me earlier, and what the service rep told me and what I remembered from the e-mail did not seem to click. Since, I was feeling rather brain dead anyway, I decided that waiting at the airport might be a better, safer thing to do.
It worked out fine and Julie and Jennifer did arrive at 1:30. We got on the shuttle that Julie wrote about in her e-mail and made our way to the hostel. Because of the time change, we wanted to try and stay vertical as long as possible and so we headed out again. First things first....learning to look right first before you cross the street. This is really important and apparently forgotten enough by tourists, that “look right” is spray painted at every cross walk….unless of course, one needs to look left first.
My first real experience with using the British Pound was at an Italian restaurant we stopped at for dinner. Things are really expensive in Scotland and with the exchange rate between the British Pound and US Dollar, I finally had to force myself to stop calculating how much stuff was costing. Otherwise, it was going to be a very depressing trip.
After dinner, we headed out again and stopped at a tourist information site. It was decided that we would take an hour long bus tour around the city the next day to try to get an idea of where things were.
After that it was a bit more walking. Okay, “a bit more walking” is a slight under-exaggeration….we walked almost everywhere, with the exception of the shuttle to and from the airports and the tour buses, everything was done on foot. Everything was uphill too….both ways. The first couple of times I walked up the hill to where Old Town Edinburgh (pre-1700s) began, I reached my target heart rate in about 2 minutes. Edinburgh is a bit hillier than Florida, and, oh yeah, a bit colder, and maybe even rainier.
We decided to walk up, one of the many Closes that are part of Old Town Edinburgh. Closes are narrow winding streets with a series of multi-leveled apartment houses, usually 7 stories high, on either side. More on those later.....
That particular walk ended in the Malt Shovel Pub, where of course, we had a pint. We were, after all, in Scotland and if you like beer and/or whiskey, Scotland is the place to be.
With a 7 hour flight and a 5 hour time difference, one pint did us in for the day. We walked back to the hostel, and crashed.
As I go through my adventure, I will occasionally add a link to a google map that I created with the entire route from Edinburgh, through the Scottish Highlands, back to Edinburgh. It's an exceptionally cool tool! The route will contain markers for places that we visited and hopefully a few pictures as well. I hope you enjoy this blog. Scotland is really very beautiful!
No comments:
Post a Comment