Edinburgh
We were once again in the city, this time in Edinburgh, Scotland. It wasn't quite as big as London, but it was busy enough. We rented another car at the train station, so I got to try my hand at city driving in the UK. It wasn't too hard since I had already had some experience with the whole "driving on the left thing" in Yorkshire. Our car was a VW Polo, and the gearshift gave me fits. I was constantly putting it in 3rd or reverse when I meant to put it in 1st gear. It was quite aggravating.
Our hotel was interesting. We had used hotel points for the room, so we were in a rather nice Sheraton hotel. It was rather modern in the rooms, with a series of light switches that would provide different illumination "scenes". I never did fully suss out exactly how the lights worked, but managed to at least figure out how to turn them off at night and on when I needed some light. There was a separate "mood light" in the bathroom, with colors that could be changed through another set of buttons.
The hallway was strange in that the lights would go out after a while, and then turn on automagically when someone entered it. The lights would come on in sections, so often the sections beyond our room would be dark except for a few lighted signs. It was rather odd, and a bit spooky. I kept expecting something from The Shining to come out of that darkness.
The day after we got there we spent most of the morning at Edinburgh Castle, which sits high up the tallest hill in the city. We took a twenty-minute guided tour and learned more history about more kings and queens. It was quite interesting. The castle also holds the Scottish crown jewels, and we saw them. Having just seen the English crown Jewels in the Tower of London, the Scottish version wasn't much to look at in my opinion.
The whole reason we got a car in Edinburgh was so that we would get out of the city and see a bit of the country. We decided to drive to Glasgow, a smaller city about an hour to the west. Julayne found something called the Falkirk Wheel on the GPS in this little town of Falkirk (imagine that) that was on the way. We had no idea what it was, only that the GPS thought it was an attraction. We decided to check it out, and were quite surprised at what we found.
The wheel is this construct that these tour boats drive into, and then the "Wheel" turns to lift the boat to the upper canals. It was quite interesting. We got to see it in operation twice. They had a nice little gift shop and cafe, and we had lunch there while we watched the wheel turn. The boats offer hour-long tours of the local canals and included two trips on the Wheel, but we didn't want to take the time so after lunch it was back in the car and onward to Glasgow.
When we arrived we drove around the city center at bit, just taking in the sights. Glasgow felt different to me than Edinburgh did, and bit less grand and more down to earth. While we were meandering through the city streets we came across a seemingly authentic New York Police Department car. It was even sporting NY license plates instead of the bigger UK plates. I have no idea if it was for a movie, but we saw no other signs of any such activity. Just the NYPD car parked on the side of the street. Strange. We got a picture of it for posterity, and you can see it in the Edinburgh Part II album. We found our way to a tall ship, and we got out of the car to look that over from the dock. The ship had been refurbished and looked very nice.
When we left Glasgow we decided to take a different way back through the country, as we had been on the expressway for the first leg. The road was somewhat reminiscent of those in Yorkshire, but they had a bit more room, so we weren't always being crowded by stone walls. We stopped at a small B and B with a restaurant along the way for dinner, where I had some deep fried haggis. the menu said it was made by a company that and that it was champion of a great haggis competition. That was enough to decide to give it a try. It was really pretty good, along with the proper British "chips". I had learned by this time the wonders of salt and vinegar on fries, and it was really quite good.
The next morning was our train back to London, and the Queen of England did her damnedest to make sure we missed it. She had followed us north to open the current session of Scottish parliament, and so that morning they were having a parade in her honor. That meant that all of the streets leading to where we needed to take the car back were closed. At one point we had passed an entrance to the train station itself which we finally got back to with just a couple of minutes before our train was supposed to leave.
The kiosk where we had done the rental paperwork was actually there, and so we literally had to leave the car and throw them the keys before running with our luggage (all of which I was carrying/dragging so Julayne could run unencumbered) for our platform. Thankfully the train was still there, even though we were both pretty sure we missed it. I had just got the luggage aboard and we climbed on after it when the conductor blew the whistle and we were off for London and home.
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