There were no photos allowed on the tour itself, so I had to content myself with pictures of some of the foods on sale in the gift shop:
From here, we hike back to up
Edinburgh Castle with the intent of touring the outside parts of the castle without a ticket, having determined that a ticket for today can only be bought for times after 130P, which we deem too late to do us any good if we keep to our plan to use our pre-purchased Holyrood tickets, too. However, upon arrival at the Castle it turns out that we can’t go through the Castle gates w/o a ticket, so the entire site is off-limits to us. I thought that only entry into the Castle building itself required a ticket, but no matter.
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| The Highland Tollboth Kirk (Church), now renamed The Hub. We could hear church bells from our hotel room on the hour - I THINK they came from here, although perhaps they came from St Giles? |
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| There were two people showing off small owls on the street on the way back to Edinburgh Castle. I frankly have no idea why they were there. |
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| Although we didn't have tickets to get in, I got close enough to avoid any of the construction cranes spoiling the shot of the castle. |
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| A closeup of the entrance to Edinburgh Castle. That's Robert the Bruce to the left and William Wallace to the right. |
Instead, we hike down the steep hill to the
National Gallery, where the main exhibit on the 3rd floor is of Old Master type stuff across approximately 18 rooms (most are double rooms, however, so there’s really about 9-11 rooms). We play the “you have to pick one which will be placed in our living room” game which makes the experience MUCH more entertaining for both of us. As usual, our tastes align for the most part. Though we don’t often both pick the same painting as our first choice, I don’t think there’s a single room where my #1 wasn’t E’s #2 and vice versa.
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| A view of the Princes Street area as we begin our walk to the National Gallery. The Scott Monument towers to the left and the Balmoral Hotel's clock to the right. |
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| Looking back up the hill from the vicinity of the National Gallery we can see Edinburgh Castle |
Exiting the museum we quickly knew that we were NOT going to hike back up to the Royal Mile along the same path we had come down. Instead, we were going to walk a mile down (flat) Princes Street, knowing that the Royal Mile was also descending down and when we (eventually) cut back over to Holyrood Palace we’d still be walking a flat path. First, however, we checked Google Maps for a quick lunch spot and settled on the convenience (and known reasonable portion size) of a
Pret a Manger for a couple of sandwiches.
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| Relaxing outside the National Gallery before making the walk to lunch |
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| A panorama from the National Gallery. The Scott Memorial and Princes Street is on e the left, the middle of the Royal Mile in in the area behind the green-domed Museum on the Mound, and Tollbooth Kirk is just behind the Gallery buildings in the foreground on the right. |
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| The Scott Monument. We were so focused on picking our way through the crowded bus stops that line Princes Street as we walked down to Waverley Station that we passed right by the monument without noticing it. We were 30' beyond it when I happened to turn around and go "huh!" |
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| A nice view of Edinburgh Castle from somewhere along Princes Street |
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| Man at work |
Hunger tided over, we made the walk over to
Holyrood House where our pre-purchased tickets were quickly scanned and we were given headphones and a player that provided a nice little audio tour through about 25 places in and around the house. Several of the narrations were by various Royals commenting about their particular affinity for Holyrood as being a house that is more inviting and comfy than many of the places they might otherwise stay (and I can definitely agree that Holyrood, while still very large, didn’t have the overwhelming and cold proportions of a Chatsworth or some of the other ridiculously huge places we’ve seen before). Overall, a better experience than expected.
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| In the courtyard outside Holyroodhouse Palace |
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| Just inside the gates of Holyroodhouse itself. Once we got inside the buildings we weren't allowed to take pictures. |
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| At this point we'd taken the guided interior tour (and enjoyed the interiors very much) and now we're heading over to see the ruins of Holyrood Abbey, built immediately abutting the house. That's house wall on the right side of the photo. |
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| Abbey ruins. You can just see scaffolding in the upper left of the photo. About 1/2 of the nave was blocked off by construction, blunting the impact of the ruins while we were there. Of course, having already seen working cathedrals at York and Durham and prodigious ruins at Fountains Abbey we were unlikely to be impressed by these ruins anyway. |
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| The audio self-guided tour next took us along a path through the gardens surrounding Holyroodhouse |
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| I don't recall if there was a description of this section, but I assume these were the remains of walls from the monastic days |
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| From behind the house there was a really nice view of Holyrood Park and Arthur's Seat. |
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| Zooming in, we could see hikers who'd make the trek to the vista point at the top of Arthur's Seat. |
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| As we were prepping to leave Holyroodhouse Palace to head back to the hotel I grabbed a one more shot of the front side of the place. |
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| A bit of closeup detail of the carvings at the front entry... |
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| ...as well as some details of the fountain. I was going to get more closeups but after taking this shot my phone's battery was completely exhausted and shut down! |
We (slowly) hiked back up to the hotel, arriving around 3P, feeling tired out by our walking over the last several days. So we grabbed a couple of hours of rest and relaxation in our room (where I am writing this now) before heading out to Howies Restaurant for our early (and final) dinner of vacation. But before that happened we enjoyed another busker outside our window. Last afternoon we had a piper playing diagonally across from us, but today it was a proto-Jimi Hendrix with his electric guitar. Like last night’s piper he’s got a beautiful afternoon to play with.
And that brings me to the weather – or the weather forecast, more to the point. Pre-trip we’d been paying a lot of attention to the weather reports, and quickly discovered that they were close to useless. When waking up each day we’d check the local weather report and, for the most part, they were almost completely useless. At 8AM today, Edinburgh report said that we’d have rain until noon and then it would clear up. Well, although there was a mist from 840-900A while we were waiting outside Mary King’s Close, there was NEVER a real rain…and by 900A all moisture seemed to disappear. So the bottom line is that UK weather reports are NOT to be trusted. You have to dress in layers and ASSUME the weather will suck, but even when bad weather was forecast we generally didn’t experience it (thankfully). All things considered, we’ve had extremely good weather for touring – not very cold, and what “rain” we’ve had has mostly been a mild damp and never anything that we’d honestly call “rain” (other than a couple of mornings where, during our driving, we had real rain).
We had a 545P at Howies, which is (I think) a semi-institution here. If it is, we wonder why? This was a flat out bad meal. They seemed to be focused on turning over the tables as rapidly as possible rather than serving good food. Things were not helped by the fact that our waiter failed/forgot to enter E’s pre-dinner salad order, only explaining that after he picked up my soup (Cullen skink, which was reasonably good) and her salad silverware, and then he also got my meat temp wrong. I ordered medium-rare but he put medium. As a result, my steak was overcooked and poorly seasoned. I’d decided at the last second to order it with a peppercorn sauce which turned out to be a brown gravy. Fortunately it was served on the side, but I was using it to try to provide some moisture to the steak. We tried their sticky toffee pudding for dessert and the difference between the version we had in York vs Howies was night and day. Howies’ was glutenous, slightly burnt (which could, perhaps, be simply a style that is considered in the realm of normal) and a disappointment. Too bad it was our last meal here, because it really wasn’t a good food note to end on.
On the walk back to the hotel the street just outside our side window was closed off by police and we could see lots of blue flashing lights at the other end of the block from an apparent traffic accident. Didn’t directly impact us but hopefully not as serious as it seemed. Once in the room we turned on DAVE TV, which has been our nightly staple on this trip (and to some extent our 2013 trip with the boys) and enjoyed the various shows, most notably “Would I Lie to You?” and, of course, QI.
Sadly, packing had to commence, since we were getting up at 3A the next morning in order to get ready for our 4A taxi to the airport and the trip home.
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