Edinburgh

with many pictures!

My birthday present this year was a trip to Edinburgh (pronounced Edin-bruh). Maxi got sick with some sort of cold/flu, and he had to miss it, but my son and I ventured forth!

It takes us about two hours to get to any point in London, door to door. From there, there’s a four-hour train to Edinburgh. It’s not a full day of travel, but there wasn’t much left of the day by the time we got to our hotel, which was lovely.

For our first full day in Edinburgh… A friend of ours had told us to hike Arthur’s Seat, and we looked it up online and thought it looked great. It said there was an easy path that only took about 30 minutes to climb. What we failed to look up was where that path began or how to get there. So we walked over an hour across the city and around the park before we got to the start of the easy path. By the time we were 20 minutes up, I was done. I tried taking a break, using my inhaler, eating a snack, drinking some water. Every time I got up and walked further, the peak looked the same distance away. Luckily my son didn’t mind that we had to bail. And we made it high enough that we saw some incredible views and got some great pictures! It was worth it.

Then we went to see Toy Story 5, and I instantly fell asleep. I liked the second half of the movie! I’m sure I would’ve liked the first, but it wasn’t in the cards that day.

After the movie, we went to dinner at an Italian restaurant that had chicken milanese and the best cheesecake that we’ve ever had—double chocolate with a layer for oreos in the middle. We were swooning. It was more like a gorgeous mousse.

Then it was kind of late. Not much was open besides restaurants and bars. But! Then we discovered a mini-golf place around the corner from us. It was basically deserted so we had a completely unrushed game of mini-golf that had silly pirate decorations and recorded jungle noises over the sound system. My son beat me by six strokes! But we both got double holes-in-one so I still felt some pride in my skills.

Overall, my phone said we walked 22,000 steps and climbed 32 floors that day.