Tuesday, June 05, 2018

Day 4 - Abbotsford, Melrose Abbey and Royal Yacht Britannia

Steps: 10246

Man, we're only 4 days in and I'm almost exhausted. Almost. It's mostly mental exhaustion...you're given so much historical information, that I really don't know where to store it all.

Today, though we were up bright and early headed to Abbotsford House, which is the house of Sir Walter Scott. I'm not a huge fan of his, because I hated reading him in high school. But having seen his house, and heard the story of his life, I'm intrigued. I might have to pull out some poems or some of his stories. His house was amazing, and so full of cool items. It put a lot into context as to why he was such a fantastic writer. It's been said he's the person who started historical fiction books.

After Sir Walter Scott's house, we headed off to Melrose Abbey. The burial place of Robert the Bruce's heart. Yes, just his heart. His body is in...um...somewhere. I can't remember. The abbey is a ruin and so magnificent it's hard to explain. There were some steps to lead to the tower, which we had to climb. Only 73 of them, so it wasn't horrible. The staircase, however, was. It was a spiral staircase and narrow. Almost too narrow...if you know what I mean. I couldn't get up there fast enough. Then coming down we encountered other people trying to get up. It was a disaster.

We had about an hour and 15 minutes left to grab lunch. So we ducked into this little cafe. Seemed good enough and wasn't overly busy. We ordered pretty quickly and then waited. We had to be back on the bus at 1pm. At 12:45 we still didn't have our meal. They were just bringing it out. So we woofed it down and ran to the bust. We were late, of course.

Turns out our little group as been the last people on the bus more times than I care to admit. It's a funny group of people we're were. If the tour guide says be back by 1pm, most of them are back by 12:45. So when you do get on the bus at 1pm they look at you as if you're late. Which technically we aren't, but I guess if you were early and you're sitting waiting for us, then you think we're late. At any rate, its becoming annoying.

This evening Billie and I went off to visit the Royal Yacht Britannia. This wasn't something I HAD to do, but Billie wanted to so figured why not. It was quite interesting and really put what being royal meant...it wasn't opulent or "over the top" fancy. The Queen actually didn't want it all fussy. Its a massive yacht though and we got to visit 4 floors of it. Afterwards, we had dinner at a restaurant just down from it. Delicious!

Tomorrow we leave Edinburgh and head to Inverness. The highlands! The main reason I wanted to come to Scotland was to see the beautiful highlands.

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