Edinburgh, Scotland

This Edinburgh blog goes with the June 2022 Blog Posts of our Viking Cruise Into the Midnight Sun. YES, still getting that blog finished. Actually, I had typed this one two months after the trip and just found it still not uploaded - I think I meant to add pictures before I did that and somehow walked away from it. So, yes, it initially took me two months to finish it but now it's actually taken a year and a half - yikes!  And I have yet to publish Greenwich. Fingers crossed!

Okay - so it took me over two months to finally post our final stop on our Viking Cruise. What can I say? It got busy when we arrived home and now it's almost September!!

So today's excursions include two stops. First we are heading to see the Royal Yacht Britannia, which used to belong to Queen Elizabeth 2, but is now a floating museum in Edinburgh. The reason behind this tour (for me) is that long, long ago on a trip to Bermuda with my parents (I was in high school), the Royal Yacht Britannia was in Bermuda awaiting the Queen to arrive for a special ceremony or pageant. I believe the year was 1976 or 1977. We (my parents) met some sailors off the ship (that's a story for another blog) and invited them back to our hotel to swim and for lunch. We, in turn, were able to go onboard the ship and walk along the deck. Couldn't touch anything for fear of leaving handprints - haha. So I thought it would be cool to go onboard again to see if I remembered it and now I could leave prints!

As I've said before, the tour guide on these trips can make or break your experience. Unfortunately today, it was a 'break your trip' kind of day. She was very sweet, very knowledgeable and overly concerned with being on time for everything; however, she was a Japanese woman married to a Scotsman and although she knew English, her pronunciation was so very difficult for us to understand (all of us on the tour) and it made the tour quite frustrating at times.

Anyway, back to The Britannia. We only had 2 hours to visit so we felt a bit rushed but we made the best of it. Totally amazing the opulence that the Queen and her family live with. And we were told that the Queen made sure she decorated the rooms in a more country style - she didn't want anything flashy (I mean just having your own yacht (cruise ship) is flashy enough!)

I enjoy following the royals as much as the next person and it was cool to see up close their living quarters and dining rooms, and the honeymoon suite where Charles and Diana visited (just a double bed - it is a ship after all). 

Next stop, lunch at a hotel restaurant located off the Royal Mile shopping area. But wait, we are now ahead of schedule so we will drive around a bit and tour from the bus. Definitely not what we signed up for. We could have stayed longer at the Royal Yacht. As I said she was a bit pre-occupied with time and worried that we would miss our next event.

Lunch was delicious - got to chat with some of our fellow travelers, but the guide allowed it to go on way too long. We were all getting restless as we wanted to head to Edinburgh Castle and hopefully have some time to shop the Royal Mile (as it was indicated when we first signed up for the tour). So we pushed her to wrap it up; but the shopping part was not to be. Here's picture of the Royal Mile - the closest I got to it:

So we now arrive Edinburgh Castle, home of the Scottish Crown Jewels and other medieval treasures. Sort of like kids on a class trip, we must walk together and then wait while the guide obtains our entry tickets. Finally we enter the castle grounds and now must gather again for the guide to give us more information. Everyone was a bit antsy so I took it upon myself to ask the guide if we could just go ahead on our own and she agreed as long as we felt we didn't need any more information from her. Someone from the back of our group said, "well, we can't understand you anyway so what's the point!" Oops - it wasn't as rude as it sounds as the guide didn't hear this, but she definitely did way too much talking. And after all that, we weren't even given a layout of the castle grounds. So we headed off to see the Crown Jewels as it gets crowded. I think a lot of the jewels were on display elsewhere because there was not much to see. Edinburgh Castle is a bunch of buildings connected together weirdly. Having a map would have helped. But the view from the castle to the city below was pretty amazing and we enjoyed our time there. We had a time to meet back for the bus and all of us were there promptly, only to find out that we are ahead of schedule again and she will take us on another tour of the city on our way back to the ship. Again, I didn't sign up for a bus tour - we could have shopped!!

As we returned to the ship (to line up for the tenders) along with every other bus that arrived at the same time! There was a pretty long line to wait for a tender. The guide wasn't going to let us off the bus until the line was not as long but I begged that I had to use the restroom (which I did) and that got us off the bus. The rest of the people followed suit.

We actually ended up on the last tender to head to the ship. It was a beautiful day so waiting outside was not a problem for us but it did cut into cocktail hour!!

Edinburg is a pretty cool city, and Ed and I, after seeing the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and now Edinburgh, definitely want to return to Scotland on our own or through a bus tour.

Oh wait - there is one more blog - our day in Greenwich, England, but there is one more day at sea before that - packing day for us.

Til then,

Betsy