Ok, so I’m going to start off telling you about our last day with Roberta and Brian. We left the bed and breakfast and headed downtown to meet Claire at the Scott Monument. The Scott Monument was dedicated to Sir Walter Scott the great author. The monument is said to be one of the largest monuments for an author ever built. There are actually stairs to climb to the top of the monument, so we decided to pay the 3 euro’s to climb the 287 stairs and see the amazing view from the top. I think it was totally worth it…and climbing the stairs was an adventure in itself. Firstly, the stairs spire straight up the inside of one of the supporting columns and you feel like you’re getting a bit dizzy the curl is so tight. And then there is the amount of headroom….it starts to decrease as you get higher and as we began to reach the top I was bending over to be about ¾ my normal height in order to make it through the opening. Another thing that only really happen near the top was the passageway got very narrow to the point that I (the skinny guy) had to turn my body a little bit to make it through without scrapping my shoulders on the walls. The view from the very top was amazing….right in the middle of downtown Edinburgh…scenery out every angle and cool structures off in the distance. I took a bunch of pictures. Oh, that reminds me….I wrote on an earlier post that I was going to staple my camera to my hip so that I don’t ever forget it again…well…apparently that isn’t enough. I remembered my camera…of course, but I managed to leave the memory card still in the slot on my laptop…I was a bit disappointed. But, Brian is an intelligent man and realized that I usually take about 10 times more pictures than he does (and most are pretty good pictures), so he decided to give me his memory card to take pictures on and made me promise to give him a copy. So everything worked out.
I have been taking lots of pictures though. I got a message from my laptop the other day to say that I was running out of disk space….who knew pictures would take up so much space. But, I managed to find a bunch of things that I could delete in order to free up some space.
Anyways, after the Scott Monument we went to another cool monument/building that had some huge columns and a tower as well. See pictures below.
After that we went to one of the streets that only pedestrians can go on and walked a long ways down to try and find a good place to eat. On the way, we came across some very interesting pub names. Take a look below to see a collage of some of the pictures.
My favourite was “Filthy McNasty’s” but everyone else wanted to eat at the “Bad Ass” pub. At the pub I decided to eat like a Scotsman and try some:
The haggis was actually quite good….I would definitely eat it again.
After lunch we departed company with Claire since she had a train to catch back to her house, but it was really great to see her again and see how she’s enjoying her life here in Scotland. So, then we jumped on a tour bus (because our 2 day tickets were still valid) and headed toward the Royal Yacht Britannia for the last of our tours that came with the 2 day ticket. It was pretty cool to think that we were walking in the footsteps of royalty as we toured the boat. And of course, the boat was absolutely amazing…with elaborate rooms and decorations, an excessive amount of silverware, and a plethora of artifacts from around the world. The yacht traveled over 1,000,000 miles over the course of its life and is now a permanent tourist attraction in Edinburgh.
The rest of the day was rather uneventful other than the fact that we ate, drank, and had a good time downtown before heading back to the bed and breakfast to watch an episode of Lost before going to bed. It was a pretty productive day I think.
Oh, ya…and I have a video from when we were in Ireland. I won’t explain it…you’ll just have to watch it.
Video
