Edinburgh, Auld Reekie
We have found Edinburgh to be an extremely expensive city to visit, especially as we stayed in a hotel here and therefore needed to eat out a lot more since we have no kitchen of our own to cook. That said, we found tons of amazing things to do around town that were free or close to it. Portobello Beach is one of those things, needing only to pay bus fare to get there and back (plus food, of course).
We did a LOT of walking all over the place. We love to walk and were putting in between 15,000 and 25,000 steps a day. We saw so many cute older buildings, monuments, a cemetery (where we found Tom Riddle’s Grave!), ponds with ducks and swans, garden areas, and the highlight of our time in downtown Edinburgh – a defunct volcano, Arthur’s Seat.
We walked the entire stretch of the royal mile, intending to walk around some gardens near Holyrood Palace, on the 6th. I had expressed interest in hiking up Arthur’s Seat earlier in the week, but Jon was a bit skeptical of the idea. However, when we got to Holyrood and saw it, Katia’s eyes lit up with pure joy. There is no mountain that girl does not want to hike up and conquer! Emmeline jumped in, as well, and so off we started on our hike up the volcano. Neither Jon nor Katia wore the greatest footwear for this, but it didn’t hinder them much. It was such an amazing hike up! We wish it had been a little less overcast that day, as the views around were amazing but would have been even more stunning with less cloud cover. Regardless, it was definitely the highlight of our day!
We all love games, as we noted from our Stirling day trip with the escape room. I had heard of Games Hub, a small little boardgame café, which also sold basic but cheap food and drinks. For the girls’ 8th birthday on September 2, their request for their birthday was to spend the morning in bed cuddling, and the afternoon at the boardgame café. Which was exactly what we did. We found some great new games in the five hours we spent here! They were older, and I don’t know if we’ll be able to find them in Canada, but fingers crossed!
We loved the board game café so much that we tried to go back again on our last night in Edinburgh on September 7. We turned the corner and I saw a firetruck out front of the building and my heart sank. It turned out there was a water leak from the unit above and it was pouring water into Games Hub. The poor sole employee that was there working, the same lovely man we met on our previous trip, was clearly in over his head and stressed out. We figured we had nothing better to do with our evening, so we asked him if we could help. He gratefully accepted, and we spent the next 1.5 hours helping him. We bought and placed buckets, mopped up rivers of water from the floors, dried off wet merchandise, and moved over 500 board games and dozens of books out of the danger zone and into dry areas. The girls were beyond excited to help out and were great helpers! Thankfully the water got shut off above and we left the store in much better shape than we found it!
We also did a couple of more touristy things. We went to the Edinburgh Castle. We spent a few hours here, and there were areas that were fascinating to see and experience. But overall, this was definitely a castle that had a lot of military history to it, which is not really something any of us are interested in that much. We did love seeing the old jail area, which had a lot of interesting information and exhibits. I also loved seeing the chapel, which is the oldest part of the castle. The girls loved that there was a pet cemetery! We saw the crown jewels of Scotland, as well. I think we all would have loved this castle more if we hadn’t just been to Stirling the day before. Had we done this one first, it would have been far more impressive. But Stirling was just such an amazing place it was hard not to compare the two experiences!
We took the girls to see the Real Mary King’s Close, which we had done before in 2011. It is three preserved closes (i.e. streets), complete with houses, from the 1600s and 1700s. It’s currently underground as they built another building above. The buildings had been 15 stories, but they chopped off the top 10, reinforced the bottom 5, and built up again. This guided tour was a huge eye-opener for the girls to see how people used to live and to learn about the plague and disease. The houses for the poor were tiny, cramped, dark, and unsanitary places. Those for the wealthy weren’t much better. The girls thought that really poor people must have lived in the house where it was actually the home of a very wealthy family. They were shocked at housing and street conditions hundreds of years ago and it gave them a real appreciation for the life we live now. Admittedly, that was the main reason we wanted to take them here, so they could get a real appreciation for the conditions of the common person back in the day, rather than just seeing fancy and expensive castles and homes of nobility.
We found the Scottish National Gallery, a free art gallery in Edinburgh that we went into and saw beautiful paintings from the past 600-ish years. We also found the National Museum of Scotland, a free museum, which we spent a LOT of time at for our last two days in Edinburgh. It had so many amazing exhibits and tons of interactive stuff for the girls to learn about all kinds of interesting things in a really fun way. They spent most of their time in the science section of the museum, but we also checked out some history, nature, animals, medical (medicine, anatomy, etc.), and communications. This museum was the other recommendation from the amazing locals who recommended Portobello Beach to us. So glad again that we chatted with them!
All in all, we did enjoy our time in Edinburgh. It was a fun city, though expensive! We were constantly walking and on the move and I think we were all pretty tired after a week there and happy to move on.