Edinburgh, Scotland, United KingdomSalisbury Court, Edinburgh Scotland
It has been a very long day.
I looked at my phone and it was 4:54 am and I felt as if I had already been up for an hour. I lay back down and don't think I slept, but I might have. I was awake when Marilynn's alarm rang at 6 am and I started folding my dry clothes, gathering what I would need for our daylong tour. when Marilynn went in to shower, I started the kettle and put out breakfast food, fixing myself some cereal. I then showered, dressed, ate my cereal and packed up.
We walked out to Bridge Street and waited for a bus. Marilynn asked the driver how close he got to Waterloo Place and he told us he could let us off at Leith. We were not certain which stop was ours, so when a bunxch of people got off, we asked, he pondered and then said we might be best getting off there and he gave us directions to Waterloo Place. Between his directions and Marilynn's gps and a little sense of direction, we got there in time. In fact we were early. We were told to go up the street and wait until 8:05 am for David, our driver.
Buses and people came and went and we waited. Some people arrived for David and some for Des. We were confused until we found out that there were two West Highland tours going out. We had seen a man in a kilt and workshoes walk up and down the sidewalk....this turned out to be David. He was quite a talker and gave us lots of information during our drive as well as stories in his lovely Scottish accent and played music for us when he was not talking. It was sort of amusing to listen to him talk, pause as he negotiated some tricky driving situation, and then resume his talk ... sometimes repeating a bit.
I will have to fill in the details of what we visited since there were so many places - the tour was subtitled castles and lochs - and David said he was throwing in a few extra stops so that was nice but I cannot remember them all by name. We visited two castles with entrance charges - the Inverary Castle having the most to see and the higher cost. It is still lived in by the Duke's family and there are lots of family photos and memorabilia. We visited a couple of castle ruins which were as romantic as David told us they would be. We visited the longest Loch and the most famous - Loch Lomond. We stopped in a few towns and villages.
The tour itself went from the East in Edinburgh north to around Stirling, or farther north I am not sure from the Scottish Lowlands which do not look dissimilar to rural New York to the Scottish Highlands which looked like the Adirondacks to me with trees, mountains and rushing mountain streams.
However more of the Scottish mountains were bare of trees, maybe from sheep grazing and maybe from previous deforestation. They were different from what I had imagined: bare mountains covered in heather or heath. I did not see any heather blooming at all or maybe I missed it. Marilynn had me stick my fingers in Loch Lomond and it was very clear water. We drove to Argyll in the West Coast where the Inverary Castle was and this was also the home of the atrocious Campbell clan that loved to watch executions for fun. We got a lot of history and some of it stuck after several iterations but I still have trouble with the Jacobites - I know now that they were followers of James - which one I am not so sure. (As I was editing my photos, I tried to look up the area of Breadalbane which was in the Highlands that we passed through before reaching the Inverary Castle. To my amazement, Breadalbin - in Perthshire - was the source of the name of the town north of Perth NY, where I grew up. My school - Perth Central School - merged with Broadalbin CS after I had graduated.
After reaching the West Coast, our tour was pretty much ended except for a few quick photo stops and then we arrived in Edinburgh with Auld Lang Syne playing. I had wanted to give David a tip but didn't have anything smaller than a 20 pound note and neither did Marilynn. Hmmm, why didn't we give him that for both of us - maybe we were too tired to think properly.
I forgot to mention our lunch ordeal. After yesterday's cafe, Marilynn had decided it is a national trait to have one person doing everything taking orders, running the cash register, etc., while 4 or 5 other people stand around doing nothing. At the Inverary Castle Cafe, I saw one young man whose job was to make coffee standing and taking a sip of his own coffee while about a dozen people stood in line ready to give their orders. I ended up changing my order to a scone so I would have time to eat it, I jettisoned the coffee order. Marilynn ordered a sandwich and had to ask one of the attendants what had happened to it. We took our stuff to go so that we would have a few minutes to explore the castle garden before heading to the bus. David the driver was standing in the food line when we were leaving and I told him that he would not get served in time because it took us 30 minutes. He did get served because he had pull...being a driver.
When we got back, I got my clothes ready to wash and Marilynn added a few things of hers. It cost me extra because there was a 5.00 min top up on the convoluted phone payment process. I put in the clothes, and realized I had forgotten the detergent, went up the 2 flights of stairs, got and put in the detergent, ran through the credit card stuff and started the washer, came up to the room, made my salmon sandwich - which was good but very dry - and then went down to collect the laundry. It is now hanging to dry. After that I sent Kara some pics. Marilynn had us both to buy train tickets for when we leave Edinburgh. Then I sent Sharon et al a few pics and explained to Sharon that I cannot caption them properly. I need to tell her I will do it eventually. Then I uploaded my Nikon photos - there were a lot - and now I a almost done with this blog. I hope I can add more when I look at the photos and edit them for the blog. David did tell us a lot of good stuff.
2025-05-22