Like I did with Bath, I’m going to give a run down of the weekend and post a link to pictures, and then when I get the time I’ll post more in depth about each of the things we got to do over the weekend. Believe me when I say, it’s a doozey!
We left Friday evening after Mark left the lab. We trained from Cambridge to York and we both discovered that traveling by train is by far the best way to travel! That is, of course, assuming you’re not on AmTrack. We got to York and it was quite late so went to bed so we could get an early start.
Saturday morning, June 26th:
Taxi to Clifford’s Tower and York Castle Museum, spend lots of money and time in the museum.
Walk through York, including the historic Shambles.
Eat lunch at very cool café. Order tasty things we can’t pronounce by pointing at the menu. Thanks Rick Steves for the tip off.
Go to the Museum Gardens. See the Abbey hospital, multi angled tower, and the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey. The ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey currently top our list of most powerful thing we’ve visited.
Walk on top of the city wall. Magically no one is around for much of our walk and we have some peace from the crowds.
Visit the York Minster, give them our money, tour through the minster, listen to the bells, attend the evensong service.
Grab dinner.
Catch the train to take us to Edinburgh. Breath.
Taxi to our hotel, where it is still broad daylight at 10pm.
Sunday morning, early wake up. Taxi to the Edinburgh Castle.
Spend lots of money and time in the Castle. Remark that some people we know could easily spend several days at the Castle and still not see it all if they read every plaque and listened to every blip on the audio guide.
Walk 1.25miles downhill down the “Royal Mile”.
Stop at St. Giles’ Abbey. Gawk at organ, one of the best in Europe. A youth school (9th grade? 10th?) is having a sound check and dress rehearsal. Luck strikes again and one of their girls busts out a clarinet and plays a movement from the Mozart clarinet concerto. A student pianist accompanies her.
Stop at the Abbey café where it is obvious the ladies of the church are selling homemade desserts. Order things we can’t pronounce by pointing. Inhale sugar and coffee and tea. Realize we just took tea as it is about 4:00.
Continue walking down the Royal Mile. Walk some more. Walk more. Stand. Walk. Walk.
Decide to purchase 24 hour tickets to the hop on/hop off double decker tour buses.
Enjoy a 45min tour. See JK Rowling’s teacher college and the hotel where she finished The Deathly Hallows. (Other very historical sites too).
Starving. Must eat. Find restaurant that looks like it has yummy food. Realize it says fries on the menu (not chips). Finally realize we’re eating at an “American” themed restaurant, complete with a blond Canadian passing off as Californian. The same way that Scottish people sometimes work at Irish bars in America. Awesome. We enjoy a club sandwich, cheeseburger, and ketchup on our fries. (The British put vinegar on their “chips”.)
After dinner go to a bar and have cider and listen to some live music. It was not Irish music, just your typical singer/guitar/electronic back ups cover group but they were good and we enjoyed ourselves.
Taxi back to the hotel. Go to sleep while it is still light out.
Monday… must find The Elephant Café! Visit café where JK Rowling wrote most of the first few Harry Potter books before she became famous. I try not to completely freak out. Another thing off my bucket list.
We hear the 1:00 cannon fire and then get lunch at McDonnalds where Mark gets the tiniest McFlurry ever. Americans would do well to learn from British portion sizes.
More bus tour as we can hardly stand or walk from exhaustion and the bus will take us to the outskirts of the city. We drive by the Botanic Gardens.
We stop at the Holyrood Palace but don’t go in because it is expensive. Across from the palace is the recently built Scottish Parliament building. We go in and walk around and decide we need to take a trip to Washington DC sometime soon.
We bus back to the bottom of the Royal Mile where we duck into the Edinburgh Musuem which is free.
Finally we take a bus to the Edinburgh airport, where we catch a flight and then a train back to our flat.
We are momentarily surprised not to be greeted by Mr. Finnigan and Jenny. Then we pass out.
And so we did it: we knocked everything off the list with just 72 hours and limited funds. Honestly we wouldn’t have done it any differently. Maybe one more day and maybe more money for eating at nicer restaurants, but we had a total blast.
You can see our hundreds of pictures from the weekend here:
Next weekend: We take on London with even less time.
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