Edinburgh

On Saturday, the 7th of October the International Director set up a trip to Edinburgh, which is the capital of Scotland. We went by train, which was beautiful. We were able to see a lot of the countryside and now have a couple more little cities that we would like to see before we leave. To answer Aunt Sue’s question from earlier, we are able to do all our side trips by bus, train or plane. Plane tickets here are quite cheap because of a price war going on.
As soon as we got there, the director walked us over the Holyrood Park and the Salibury Crags. We hiked about half way up and John Wilson told us all about the sights from there. The views were gorgeous from there… here are a few of them.

In the far background, you can make out Edinburgh Castle.

This is part of the crag that we hiked up. We don’t get to see beautiful rolling hills like this in Glasgow. Mike and I would have to take a bus to the outskirts to see them, so it was nice to be able to in a city.

This is Holyrood Palace. The Queen stays here when she visits Scotland. She has her own flag that she flies when she is there (she wasn’t this weekend). We could have toured the Palace and Abby, but it was £12. We decided that we would rather eat.
There were about 100 students that went on the trip, so we decided to split from the group, since they were just going to be doing a quick tour of the city and it was noon and there was still a long list before anyone planned on stopping to eat. We stayed on the Royal Mile this time, but have lots of plans for next time. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to Edinburgh until 11am and didn’t break off from the group until noon-ish, so we didn’t get to start seeing the city until about 1:30pm and then a lot of places started closing at 5pm. We were still able to see much of the Royal Mile and only have to hit a few more place on our next visit, on of the main places being Edinburgh Castle. You need most of the day to see it and we didn’t want to have to pay to see it twice, so decided to wait. Also I have added more pictures to Flickr. Some are from our trip, and some are from earlier.

These boys played beautifully. Nearly everyday we can hear bagpipes being played. Some play better than others, and these boys were up at the top of the list.