We got up around 10am again. We didn’t get a very good nights sleep last night. It was sooo cold, and it just kept getting colder all night! I finally made myself warm enough by wearing my slippers in bed and covering my feet with my leather jacket. I also put the two extra pillows under the covers with me as added insulation!
Once we got up we had a lot of chores to take care of. A lot of dishes needed washing. I washed them all in the shower! Another new experience for me. =P The sink here is incredibly small. The room of the B&B isn’t so bad, but it definitely has the worst bathroom yet! Once you walk in you have to hide in the corner just to get out of the way so that you can close the door. Why someone would make the door of such a tiny bathroom swing inwards is beyond me! Davin and I have started simply staying on opposite sides of the room when we use the bathroom so we don’t have to deal with closing the door! It’s ridiculous...
We have to spend a lot of time cooking and doing dishes, but we figure it’s probably not that much more than going to sit down restaurants. Even if it’s a little more time, I think it’s fun to make our own food and everything. Plus, I love saving money and we are definitely doing that! Even after taking into account the cost of the cook plate and cooking utensils, we probably made up that amount of money by not eating out three nights. It costs about 20 Pounds for two to eat out in Britain, which amounts to about $30 every time! Twenty DOLLARS would barely almost on a grudging day be reasonable to me. Thirty is just so far beyond the realm of reasonable I don’t even want to contemplate how much money we would waste eating out every day at that prices!!
At 11:40am we were finally ready to go out. We decided to drive to the city instead of deal with the bus since it was already so late. It turned out to be a good decision. We found a parking structure close to the Royal Mile which charged a flat rate of 4P on weekends. Yay for it being Sunday!
It was a short walk to Canongate Church. Unfortunately, Davin and I both somehow missed the large building surrounded by gravestones and walked all the way to the end of the Royal Mile, talking about this and that, before realizing that something had gone wrong... So we had to hike back up the hill to find the Church which was actually quite easy since it was, like I said, a huge old church surrounded by gravestones. Whoops. Anyway, once we found the church it was easy to find the person that we had come to visit: Adam Smith. Adam Smith is considered by many to be the father of economics, and, somewhat more erroneously, the father of capitalism. Since we enjoy the study of economics so much, we wanted to visit Adam and have our picture taken with him, or, more precisely, with the stone that marks the spot of Adam’s final resting place.
With our pictures in hand, we then walked all the way up the Royal Mile until we reached Edinburgh castle. We stopped to take a picture in front of Games Workshop and an Adam Smith statue.
Entry to the castle was expensive (14P/person), and it’s really not the greatest castle. We mostly saw it because it was there to be seen. The view from the castle was really beautiful however. We were lucky to find ourselves visiting on a rare clear day, and we could see the whole city lying beneath the castle, and out across the Firth of Forth (the estuary of the river Forth) to the green lands of the next peninsula.
In the castle we saw the Scottish royal jewels which are now defunct because Scotland doesn’t have its own king anymore. We read some history of the sieges that occurred at the castle when various royal people were fighting over the right to be King or Queen. We saw the huge cannon of Mons Meg. (Davin was happy to have yet another artillery picture with it. He plans to make a collage of all his pictures with artillery from the trip. He isn’t in love with artillery or anything. We just took his picture with artillery a couple times and it somehow morphed into a tradition. Now anytime we see a piece of artillery, one of us points and shouts “Artillery!” and we run over to take Davin’s picture with it. It’s very random.) Lastly, we walked through the castle vaults (subterranean rooms) which were once used as prisons in the late 1700s. American prisoners fared the worst in these prisons because, during the American War for Independence, the British considered them to be pirates and traitors, not ordinary prisoners, and they were subsequently treated inhumanely for being the most abominable of criminals.
We left the castle around 3pm, and went to have lunch at a local pub that sold Bangers and Mash. We had found the place while walking up to the castle, and it sold bangers and mash for a reasonable (sort of...) 7.95P. In total, our two meals and drinks cost 19Pounds. At least the food was really delicious. It didn’t look like much but it was really tasty!
We made it back to the car around 4pm. When we arrived Davin found to his surprise that he had left his driver’s side window right open! Apparently, noone had noticed, or at least noone nefarious, because everything was still in our car where we’d left it. I suppose we would have been lucky that, if someone had stolen all our things, all of our valuables were in our room at the B&B anyway. The only major loss would have been the car itself.
On our way back to our B&B, we stopped at a Tesco to recycle our collection of soda cans and bottles, and to buy some soup to go with our leftover baguette. At first we were thinking we would get ‘Cream of Tomato’ soup, but when we got to the soup aisle and saw ‘Scotch Broth’ how could we resist? “When in Scotland...”.
Back at the B&B, Davin and I took turns showering. It turns out the bathroom is even worse than I initially though. In addition to its small size, the shower does not have any cold water! The coldest I could get the shower was at the upper limits of my heat tolerance, and anyone who knows me knows that I like really hot water! There was definitely some pain involved in getting used to this water temperature. When I got out, I warned Davin about the problem. When he got out, he informed me that he thought he’d succeeded in lowering the water temperature... but in fact the shower simply ran out of hot water so he had to take a luke warm shower instead!! We both think that I got the better deal.
All cleaned up, we then watched a ridiculous FOUR episodes of Voyager. Yes, apparently Davin and I DID sail half way round the world to watch Star Trek... While we watched, we ate. First I had tea and chocolate cake (which we bought at Tesco yesterday, it’s actually really good for a store bought product!). Then we had our two course dinner. First, Scotch Broth and bread, followed by leftover Kung Po chicken on rice.
Before bed, Davin asked me what we are doing tomorrow and the day after. I’m afraid my answer was “I have no idea!” I simply can’t keep the details of such a long trip straight! Luckily, I have my itinerary to remind me of what I’m supposed to do each day. Unfortunately, if both my and Davin’s computers stopped working, we would know nothing except where we are staying each night! We laughed about the ridiculous nature of our trip. At least every day is a surprise when we rediscover what our plans of the next few days will bring! Finally, we went to bed early today (for us) at 11:30pm.
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