Ocean Hostel Edinburgh

312 miles - set off at some un-Godly hour to drive from Chesterfield to Fife, Scotland to watch football! Trish likes the journeys but thinks the idea is crazy. Anyway, we are here now! Prior to the match we walked around the town - NOT Scotland's biggest attraction. Anyway, 2:30pm and I arrive at the ground ready for the match. One stand is fairly ...

... is screaming for mercy. Found some very nice cookies though, yum!

Time for some wandering! We didn't hit the Royal Mile unfortunately, but we did get a good wander up and down Princes Street. Waiting around in Pizza Hut for some food, just having a general laugh.. who needs to be touristy when you get the full-on local effect?

And the best part was.. SNOW! Very random and very light, but it was there :)

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom kilgiraffe

Today, I was planning to go to the youth hostel at the castle, but the Land Rover had other plans!!!

Oh dear, game over! I popped out to start the Land Rover this morning at around 9am and the engine was smoking like a trooper and sounding a lot worse than it normally does. I called the AA at around 10:00 and they turned up at at around 10:45 from a local garage. He told me that the engine is fairly terminal (piston problem ...

My program took us to scotland for 4 days and it was amazing. It turns out the Britain is not that small since it took us like 10-12 hours to get to and from Edinburgh by bus. We did stop by the fountain of abbey and hadrians wall though.

July 3rd - Edinburgh - Day 4: "When Is a Bus Station Not a Bus Station?"

As expected, 3:30am did come around rather early, and the alarm clock worked just fine. I bought one that features 24-hour “military” time so it would be idiot-proof, i.e. there would be no way to think I was setting the alarm for 3:30am and set it for 3:30pm by mistake. Our flight to Edinburgh was at 6:25am. I was thankful I had made the effort to get everything ready to go the night before ...

... On the ghost tour the night before, i had lost one of my gloves on one of the hills, so we went to try and retrieve it. I'm glad we went up there - it was one of the best views of the city! It's a funny hill also - the remains of an unused observatory (there's 90% cloud cover in Scotland), a telescope monument and a half finished acropolis. It was meant as a tribute for all the Scotish troops who served under Napolean, but they ran out of money half way through construction, so it ...

... I slipped in and ordered one of the best guacamole bacon burgers I've ever had. It even came with free onion rings and lemon water, how 'bout that? I was likin' this city already. I explored various little Scottish shops the rest of the evening, including a scotch whiskey shop and many kilt and tartan stores. If I had a couple hundred extra pounds on me to spend I would've definitely thrown down for a complete kilt outfit. They are dead sexy! Today I woke up and walked ...

... to keep a count of how many kilts I spotted throughout the whole trip (Kilt Count). Low and behold, we turned the corner to see the culprit of this almost annoying, but yet still beautiful music--an older man was jamming out in his kilt get-up on the street. We couldn't help but break out in some kind of a jump/dance/skip, take pictures, give him some pence and keep on our way. Little did we know that this man was only the first of many ...

... William, Oban, and Glasgow. I leave here on Monday, and I should arrive in Glasgow in just over a week, after which I'll book myself a bus and ferry to Ireland. In the meantime, here are some pictures of Edinburgh from the first roll of film, developed today. The scans came out much darker than the photos, but they're better than nothing...

Had a bit of time with Vanessa for a smoked salmon dinner and a few G&Ts. The sunshine came out so we walked from the Holyrood Palace end of the Royal Mile to Edinburgh Castle. Plenty of people about for a Rod Stewart concert and activity gearing up for the upcoming Military Tatoo.