Arthur's Seat and The Museum

Even though we were still at a Travelodge, our free breakfast was not at all the same.  At this hotel, our free breakfast was cornflakes, milk, and OJ, with a super bitter orange-cranberry muffin and a packet of tea.  There was no kitchen, so we had to go down to the lobby and pick up our free breakfast kit and then take it back up to our room to prepare and eat it, with tiny plastic spoons.  After the awesome spread in London we were quite disappointed.  Lizzy promised to take us out for a traditional Scottish breakfast at The Standing Order.  It was originally a bank, but was taken over by Wetherspoon, a conglomerate of pubs that use pre-existing buildings with interesting architectural histories.  This particular Wetherspoon had redecorated the bank with a wide range of Scottish authors, artists, and other important personages. We ate in the Robert Louis Stevenson Suite.  Breakfast was just exactly like the one back in London with the addition of blood pudding and potato scones.  The scones were great, the blood pudding, not so much.  It was basically a very dry, well done, sausage patty.  But it was super cheap and Rob and I split one plate of food and it was plenty for both of us.  He ate more of the blood pudding than I did.

Then we foolishly set off for Arthur's Seat which, as was poorly explained to us before we left, was a rock that you could climb on top of in the middle of a park and see really far around Edinburgh.  We bought a guide book before we left and it had a map in it but again, it's not a topographical map and nowhere did it say that Arthur's Seat is in fact AN EXTINCT VOLCANO and is 822 feet high!  Sadly, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

As I said yesterday, just getting to Holyrood Park was a trial because everything is up, so our legs were already tired before we even made it to the path that leads to Arthur's Seat.  The map told us there was a shorter, steeper path and a longer, less steep path and we chose the latter.  We did our best and ended up at the ruins of an Abbey.  We were quite happy to rest there and take some gorgeous photographs.  

We asked some fellow hikers how much further and they told us we were about halfway.  We bravely carried on.  Once we ascended into the clouds and could no longer see anything in front of our faces we were exhausted and a little scared.  We again asked how much further of some people who were on their way back down.  They told us it wasn't that much further but that they'd had to climb the rest of the way using their hands  to help them along because that's how steep it was.  When I say we were on a path, we were really on a very narrow, rocky trail.  So we took two photos to prove we'd made it that far, although all you can see is fog, and then we went back down.  Even if we had made it all the way to the top, you can tell we wouldn't have been able to actually see anything.

Us at the end of our Arthur's Seat quest.

Our view from where we stopped.

Here's an aerial view of where we were.  The red marker is Arthur's Seat.  The convergence of paths to the right of the marker is where we stopped.  The lake directly at the top right hand corner is where we walked back to and took photos with the ducks. Below the lake is St. Margaret's Chapel, where we stopped at first.  You can't see it unless you zoom way in.  It's the tiny grey dot in the V of the paths.

On the way back down, we decided to go down to the lake we'd seen behind the Abbey.  There were ducks and geese and lots of pretty flowers.  We felt lucky to have survived it.  And then we still had to walk back to the town and find lunch.  The first place we saw that had fish and chips was the winner.

 Museum of ​EDINBURGH

After lunch, and because it was on the way back to the hotel, we stopped in at the Museum of Edinburgh.  That was neat.  It was basically a history of the town.

The costume Gallery

Robert Louis Stevenson's house

The World's End

We love the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost Cornetto movies so we were really excited to find the third and final installment here in Edinburgh.  We were going to hunt down The Winchester pub (in real life The Duke of Albany) while we were in London, but once we did some research on it, we found out it had been sold and then completely redone into apartments, so there wasn't a point.  The actual pub used in the film is The Gardner's Arms in Letchworth Garden City.

I found Tom Baker!  Yes, this is how we dressed every day, because it was this cold and damp here.  It's the weather we expected in London but didn't get until we got to Scotland.

This is the awesome bookstore we found while walking back to the hotel.

There's a pub named for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!

Burke and Hare were infamous grave robbers that made their money selling cadavers to the medical school back when it was very difficult to legally acquire them for anatomical studies/dissection.  Both Burke and Hare were Irish, but were living in the same lodging house in Edinburgh when they went from grave-robbing to murder, eventually killing 16 people in one year.  They were caught and Hare was granted immunity for turning King's Evidence on Burke who was tried and found guilty.  Burke was hanged and in an ironic twist of fate, his body was sent to the medical school for dissection. 

Here's the Wikipedia article if you want to read up on them. There's a movie about it starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis, directed by John Landis. It's super hilarious right up until the end.  ​

We had pizza for supper and noticed that it was right across the street from where we were going to see Wicked the next night.  The pizza was amazing, plus we were so tired, we ate every last bit and then had to stagger home.

We made it back to the hotel finally !

This is how my day ended.  I will never see stats like this on my fitbit ever again.