Our Last Day

Our last day was a day spent exploring Edinburgh some more.  We were getting pretty tired so we tried to take it easy but we also wanted to pack in as much as possible so that our last day wasn't wasted.  We had breakfast at the hotel, packed up our bags and left them with the concierge.  We had decided to walk up Arthur's Seat which is is this huge craggy cliff on the east side of town with a spectacular view.  I wasn't too keen on it since it was supposed to take 2.5 hours and be very steep but Reuben was convinced that it was doable.  So we tried to catch the bus from the centre of town out to the bottom of the cliff but when we finally found the correct bus stop, we discovered that the bus only started running at 12:30 on Sundays.  It was 9:30am.  So, we decided to walk up to Edinburgh Castle first.  The sun was actually shining for once and we enjoyed our tour of Edinburgh Castle although there were a lot of other people there.  This was slightly frustrating when we ended up in a crush of people trying to race through the section on the Crown Jewels.  We found the military museums especially interesting and well done.

Just as we were about to leave Edinburgh Castle, there was a torrential downpour but we couldn't just stay there indefinitely so we covered up as much as possible and continued along out of Edinburgh Castle and down the Royal Mile.  As the shower ended, we passed a piper in a doorway playing.  How typical, hey?

After all this, we decided not to climb Arthur's Seat but went down to check out Holyrood Palace (we didn't go in because you had to pay admission) and then walked up Royal Mile from that end.  There are some cool nooks and crannies along the way.

After this, we grabbed some lunch at a pub.  I had deep fried haggis balls!!  They were delicious:)  And we shared a burger, which wasn't that great.  We each tried the guest ale on draft. Then we went over to Dean Garden and walked along a small river for awhile.  When the path petered out we ended up in a quiet suburb of Edinburgh and then on our way to a bus stop we happened upon a small, local farmer's market so we had some hot chocolate, a brownie and some Scottish shortbread.  Then we took the bus to Ocean Terminal to try and see the Royal Yacht Britannia, which the Queen uses but you can take tours of it.  We didn't take a tour since it cost money and we didn't get a really good view of it since it is surrounded by a huge mall.  But we did see a French naval ship and a Swedish submarine so that was cool.

It was such a cold and rainy afternoon that we got pretty tired of aimlessly wandering around the city.  We ended up back at our hotel around 5:30pm and grabbed our luggage and hopped on the bus going to Glasgow that conveniently stopped at a bus stop across the street from our hotel.  

The bus was packed but the trip was uneventful.  It took an hour to get there.  We were dropped off at the central bus station and then took a shuttle bus to Glasgow airport.  From there we walked to the Holiday Inn Express. It's a 5 minutes walk from the main terminal so very convenient.  We tried to go to sleep as soon as possible since we needed to be up at 4:30am the next morning. 

The next morning we quickly got our stuff together, grabbed a piece of toast and a coffee from the hotel and headed over to the airport to check in.  There was a bit of confusion because I thought we had to check in with Scandinavian Airlines but the flight was actually being operated by British Midlands.  Fortunately, there were no lineups at the check-in or at security.  So we had plenty of time to wait for our plane at the gate.  The flight over to Copenhagen lasted 2 hours.  We had a 2 hour wait at the Copenhagen airport so we wandered around a bit and when we spied some Danish's for sale we decided that having a Danish in Denmark was definitely called for.  They were scrumptious!!

And then we were on our way home.