London and Edinburgh
Been a bit from my last posting, good reason for this though as I was away on a trip with my wife to London and Edinburgh. The trip was to celebrate one year of marriage with my wife.
This was my 3rd time going to London, it’s a great place and where I asked my wife to marry me. Right outside the The National Gallery over looking Trafalgar Square in December with everything done up for winter! This trip to London was more of a small stop on our way to Edinburgh and to check out some things we always seem to miss. We checked out Stonehenge, the Doctor Who Experience and London Tower.
After are time in London we hopped on to a train and when up to Edinburgh. It was about a 4 hour ride that was beautiful as we when around the coast. I really enjoy Edinburgh, it quickly became my second favorite place, first still being Queensland in New Zealand. Edinburgh has a very laid back feel to it, especially coming from London. It’s very much a walking city, you can get to most places that you would want to see just by walking but if you need to go farther out there is a nice bus system in place that you can use.
We did a lot of walking around the Royal Mile which is the road the leads from Edinburgh castle and to the Holyrood Palace. This is really a main hub for a lot of things like stores and tours. We did go on 2 tours, one to the vaults and the other to Mary King’s Close. Both there good, but I enjoyed the Mary King’s Close as it was less about ghost stories and more about the history of the place.
Edinburgh castle, it was fun to see a old castle and listen to the stories behind it. One of the cool things that happen here is at 1:00 PM they fire this canon, this use to be used to signal the ships in the harbor that it was 1PM for they could set their clocks to the right time. I was able to get a nice shot of this, lucky with the timing!
Holyrood Palace on the other end of the Royal Mile was nice, not as good as the castle but good to see anyways. It’s still a fully working Palace which the royal family still uses. Very fun self audio tour you can take here that gives lot of info about that place, more then what you can just get by walking around. The views from the place are very nice and the walk through the gardens is worthwhile. In the background of the Palace is Arthur’s Seat, an extinct volcano that has a elevation of 823 ft. My wife and I did hike to the top of Arthur’s seat. A bit of work but not that bad, was worth it for the photos!
Overall the trip was great, a lot of fun and I can see my self coming back to Edinburgh and also checking out Glasgow too. Why no blogs like with my honeymoon? Well I didn’t take my laptop with me, I picked up an iPad 2 for the trip. For the 2 week trip the iPad was great, good battery life and was very helpful as a map with GPS. I found reading books on it easy and if I needed to entertain myself I got the web in my hands along with some fun little games. I felt a lot happier bringing the iPad then my home/work laptop in case anything was to happen to it. So… there is my mini review of the iPad.