July 17-19

Greetings from Scotland! Our group has grown to now include Steve.

When we left off, we were in York.  We went to the National Railway Museum on Thursday morning - dad had a delightful time exploring all of the train engines.  They were quite impressive and I was much more interested in everything there than I was expecting.

Awesome sign at the train museum...

We then headed north to Edinburgh.  Our car GPS (nicknamed "Her Majesty") took us off the highway and onto one lane roads for much of the lengthy journey.  It was a very pretty drive, but a bit of an adventure in many places with narrow roads and crazy curves.  We took a little detour to see Hadrian's Wall.  We didn't quite realize what it was until we drove by, though (there wasn't really anywhere to pull over and stop).  It pretty much looks like most of the other walls all over the place.  The big, famous part of the wall was on the western side of the island.  We got into the apartment and met up with Steve.

On Friday, we went on a bus tour of the city and spent time at Edinburgh Castle.  It is quite the mighty fortress with all sorts of neat things to see, perched high above the rest of the city.  The crowned jewels were lovely.  These included a huge sword, practically as tall as me.  We also got to see the Stone of Destiny!  This is the stone used during the coronation of British monarchs and it has a very long history.  It's a really big square stone, it looks quite heavy.  We also got to see lots of fully kilted guys playing bagpipes on street corners, which was highly entertaining.

Today, we headed out of the city to see some old buildings.  It's been the first day with less than ideal weather - foggy and rainy, but somehow fitting for Scotland.  First, we went to Roslin to see Rosslyn Chapel, made famous in The DaVinci Code.  It was a neat but strange little chapel.

We then headed east to visit Tantallon Castle, on the coast.  It's all ruined now but was open for exploration.  It was pretty cool, especially with the weather the way that it was.  We lunched in Dunbar at some little shop, which was yummy.  Sadly, we didn't get to see the home of our famous ancestor Black Agnes.  Alas.