Edinburgh

We were really excited to go to Edinburgh because we heard such great things about it. We stayed in a hotel across the street from a big movie theater complex with lots of bars and restaurants inside (we actually ate Thanksgiving dinner in there). Gavin loved the giraffe statues outside.

Rocking the Nessie hat.

St. Cuthbert's Church.

I loved the inside of this church. It was really light and bright inside, especially with the light shining through the stained glass.

The Edinburgh Castle.

It was amazing to see how the castle is built on the cliffs.

We waited to tour the castle the next day because it was St. Andrew's day and the castle was free then.

The view from the castle.

The castle starts the street called the Royal Mile, which has a ton of shops. We stopped at this store that made the tartan fabrics. It was really interesting to see how it gets made. The machines were incredibly loud.

St. Giles' Cathedral.

We stopped at this great pub for lunch called Whiski. Gavin and I had haggis. I actually had vegetarian haggis, but Gavin went for the real thing. He really enjoyed it.

My veggie haggis.

Along the Royal Mile, there were this little alley ways called, "close".

The Balmoral hotel.

The Royal Mile.

Holyrod Palace, which is where the Queen stays while she is in Scotland. This is where the Pope came to when he visited Scotland a few months ago.

The Princes Street Garden was having a winter festival, which was a lot of fun. I have always wanted to ride one of these spiral slides and I finally got to! You can see me at the top, getting ready to go down.

I loved this ride for kids. They had to run this obstacle course while in a giant hamster ball.

A view of the winter festival and the castle in the background.

Even the buses have tartan fabric.

Scotland gets really dark really early since it's so far north. The sun would set around 2pm, which really limited our touring time. So, we need to make a confession. We went and saw a movie that night. It was around 4 when we got back to the hotel and we didn't want to spend the night in the hotel room, but it was too dark and cold to go see anything. We feel a little guilty about it, but oh well. :)

It snowed overnight, so it was nice and slick and cold for our tour of the castle. It was different than any other castle we have toured because it consisted on different museums.

The cemetery for the soldiers' dogs.

The castle does a cannon show where they fire cannons, but we missed it.

I was ready to take out the Ferris wheel.

This is where the Honours of Scotland are displayed, which is the crown jewels. We weren't allowed to take any pictures, but they were really pretty.

Part of the Royal Residence. One thing I found interesting was the Royals didn't like to stay here since it wasn't as comfortable as Holyrod Palace, but the castle was much more secure.

This was the Scottish National War Memorial, which is a memorial to the Scots who died in the First World War.

The Prisoner of War Museum.

Part of one of the prison doors.

You could see what prisoners has carved into the door.

Another one of the prisons.

A prison cell.

At the castle is the National War Museum, which had many relics from Scotland's military history.

Gavin loved all of the old swords.

The view from the castle.

After the castle, we went to Calton Hill. We were able to get there right as the sun was setting.

The National Monument, which is a tribute to those who died in the Napoleonic Wars.

Gavin climbed up it, but it just wasn't going to happen for me. :)

A view of Holyrod Palace and the Scotish Parliament buildings.

A view of Arthur's Seat, which is the volcano.

The city observatory.

The next morning, we had to leave Edinburg really early because we had an early flight out of Glasgow. It snowed pretty hard over night. We struggled to get the car up the hill out of the car park. The car park worker who was helping us said, "Don't you Yanks get any snow over there?"

It took us about 3 hours to make the 45 minute drive to Glasgow. We were lucky our flight was delayed because we would have missed it otherwise. We boarded the plane and were told that the place needed to be de-iced, so we waited another hour. After that, we were told that the place needed to be de-iced again, which took another 45 minutes to do. Finaly, we back out from the terminal and waited there for abouther 20 minutes. Then we were told that the airport was closed, so we pulled back into the terminal. We waited on the plane for another 20 minutes and were told that we could wait inside since it would be more confortable and that we would reboard soon. As soon as we got inside, we were told that our flight had been canceled and that we needed to get out luggage and make other arrangements. So we ran to get our luggage and join the ridicuously long line. We were lucky Gavin ran ahead to get in line while I waited for the luggage because we got the last seats on the last flight to Bristol that night. What killed me was we were one of three flights to get canceled, flights were taking off while we were wating 2 hours to be de-iced, and the airport reopened 20 minutes after we deboarded the plane.

So we got to wait in the airport for 16 hours. We weren't even allowed past security at this point, so we had to sit out front. Gavin played Angry Birds.

Gavin couldn't see where the entrance to security was until I pointed out there was a huge sign that said "departures".

We really enjoyed Scotland. It's so beautiful and has some really interesting history. It was great to see where a lot of my relatives came from.