Tommy Tourist
Our second full day in Edinburgh. The kids had a plan to go visit some of Edinburgh’s many free galleries and museums. My plan was to visit the Royal Mile, which to some extent is a big open-air museum anyway.
We grabbed a very quick breakfast in the hotel and then set off in the mid-morning in search of whatever we could find. I left the kids on Princes Street outside the two galleries. I was expecting they’d spend all day there.
Up the Hill and Back Down
My route took me from the museums straight up The Mound and onto the Castle Esplanade. The plan was to meander my way around the south side of the castle rock and then come back up the Royal Mile. The area is pretty well flush with Adventure Lab caches as well as a smattering of “proper” caches.
I started with a virtual and a couple of labs on the Castle Esplanade before descending the very steep steps down onto the Grassmarket.
In this area of Edinburgh there’s a series of labs dedicated to ancient water sources and another tracking various bits of Harry Potter lore. J. K. Rowling was living in Edinburgh when she started writing the books, and that series of labs marks a few of the spots where she used to write and/or where she found inspiration. One of those is close to Grassmarket, in Greyfriars Kirkyard – the grave of Thomas Riddell. It took me ages to find that one, partly because I discovered after some time that I was on the wrong side of a substantial wall. A lot of the graves here have headstones placed directly against (or in) the large walls. If you’re on the wrong side, your GPS might be telling you you’re spot on but you might have no sight whatsoever of your target.
The National Museum
The National Museum of Scotland is filled with items of cultural and historical interest from Scotland. And trust me, Scotland’s got a lot of history and quite a lot of culture. As a result, the museum is big. And, in fact, the main building (the former Chambers Street Museum) is a museum piece in itself. It’s one of those fanatastically futuristic (at the time) Victorian structures composed of masses of cast iron and a big vaulted glass roof. See the photo at the base of this post.
Also in the museum was a set of Adventure Labs picking out some of the key exhibits. There’s the possibility with this kind of thing of it turning into a disaster. First of all, the exhibits are indoors, which means you might struggle with signal. Secondly, they’re indoors, so using Google Street view or a map is useless. However, the five points are all named and I found them all fairly quickly, despite there being multiple floors to the building.
In hindsight though, I would say that one could easily dedicate an entire day or two just to wandering around the museum. There’s loads of it.
More Pottering
From here, I walked east past the Law Courts and onto South Bridge and Nicholson Street, where’s there’s a cafe that was reputedly visited by Rowling regularly when she was writing the first book.
A couple more blocks on from here, and then down a long (and cache free) street, I found myself at the Scottish Parliament. I didn’t walk around the front of it though. I’ve been there before some years ago. No, I ducked around the back and started picking my way up the Royal Mile.
It was beginning to look a lot like lunchtime by this point, but I hadn’t heard anything from the kids. Walking up the Royal Mile I passed various bits of more Adventure Lab series. I seemed to be working in backwards-number order for some of them. There were a few earthcaches too, so I attempted all of those that could be done from a single location.
On my way up the hill I passed Cadenhead’s Whisky Shop – I promised myself I’d return later in the weekend.
Lunch O’Clock
Halfway up the Royal Mail I was called by Minimus to left me know they were taking a break from museums, and could we meet up for lunch. I asked them to walk up the hill and meet me on the Royal Mile outside St Giles Cathedral next to the Heart of Midlothian. Being Easter, it was busier than a busy thing on the Royal Mile, but thankfully I found them fairly quickly. And also thankfully, they’d made it to the top of the hill and found the Heart with relatively little stress.
For lunch we weren’t quite sure what to do. We wandered in the general direction of Grassmarket to see if we fancied anything. We did fancy some fish and chips, so we went into Bertie’s Proper Fish and Chips on Victoria Street. They were busy, but we were quite happy to wait for a table near their bar and then equally happy to sit for ages and eat slowly. Some beer was involved too. And it was very, very nice.
The kids had had a busy morning and had, apparently, got about halfway around one of the floors in one of the galleries. OK, more time is required, clearly. So I think they were ready for a sit down too.
More of That
So in the afternoon the kids fancied a bit more gallery action, so I left them to it again. I wasn’t quite sure what I was planning but I’d done a bunch of caches so I wasn’t too bothered about doing more.
Ultimately I decided just to finish a few things down the Royal Mile and then go to Cadenheads, where I spent a fairly disgraceful amount of money on whisky. Well, they sell stuff you can’t get anywhere else.
At around the same time I was in there, I received a text to say the kids couldn’t really be bothered with any more gallery, so they’d just gone back to the hotel for a lie down. It was well into the afternoon by this stage anyway, so that was fine. I followed them there, having first dropped the whisky off in the back of my car.
As we’d eaten loads at lunchtime there wasn’t much call for a proper dinner, so we scooted over the road from the hotel to the Conan Doyle pub for some snacks (well, chips and sandwiches).
The kids had had enough by this time, so they packed up and went to their room. I wasn’t quite ready for that, so I explored my way down Broughton Street and had a couple of nice whiskies in the Barony Bar whilst listening to a live band. It was a good end to an excellent day.
