Shoving yer granny off a bus in Edinburgh

A day after we arrived back from Dublin, Ross and Jennie arrived in Cambridge for a wee visit before Ross, Matt and I set off on our road trip around Scotland. Unfortunately Jennie couldn't make it because she was busy with two 21st parties back in Hereford!

First stop: Edinburgh. And our friend Kimmi joined us there for the rest of the trip. Our hostel neighboured the Edinburgh Castle which helped a lot when we tried to find our way home a few times after beers a plus. "Just look for the Castle" - easy!



On our first night we were lucky enough to catch a live one man show. He was dressed in the awful tartan pants and played a banjo and a harmonica (sometimes at the same time!) and sang old time scottish tunes (some of which Ross and I recognised thanks to Ed's attempts!) and some more contemporary tunes. It was quite a sight and we had a great time - and came close to spending 15 quid on one of his CDs, as you do!



The city is beautiful, even on a dreary day - the cobble-stoned streets that were paved with Georgian style houses that don't look at all out of place. With statues commemorating all sorts of figure heads including the Duke of Wellington and David Livingstone, we felt we were constantly walking through a museum. Fantastic!


We took in an open top bus tour of Edinburgh and a walk around the castle. We attempted a pub crawl down Rose Street and added a few more of our own.

I also managed to spend a good 2 hours in the Scotland Registers Office tracking down copies of births, deaths, and marriage certificates to take back to Ed for addition to the Parker family history. It was uber interesting and I can appreciate how people can get really enthralled in tracing back family trees. I myself was happy to meet Ross and Matt at the pub afterwards for a well earned pint!

We fell in love with Edinburgh and highly recommend it to anyone visiting Scotland - not to be missed!

Having a craic of a time in Dublin

We discovered that Ryan Air had a sale on flights to Dublin, so we hopped on the net and picked up free flights (but obviously had to pay airport tax) so we were happy. We then tried to book accommodation and that was when we discovered that Dublin is the second most expensive city in the world (after New York)!! Oh well, at least we got cheap flights hey.

Unfortunately the start to our trip didn't go too well - we were delayed for 3 hours! We arrived at about 2am in Dublin so needless to say we couldn't really see too much of the city!



But that was probably the worst of our trip, because we had a fantastic time! We fell back into being tourists quiet easily and managed an open top bus tour of the city, a visit to the Guiness Storehouse, a walk around famous St Stephen's Green, a trip to Dublin Castle, and a couple of nights out in Temple Bar. And we went and saw a movie as well.





We were also lucky enough to meet real, proper Irish people - everywhere we went there were loads and loads of Americans all tracing their family history, we thought we were never gonna meet a real, proper Irishman - who took us round a few pubs, which was awesome!

A long weekend was long enough for us in Dublin, mostly cause we would never have been able to afford to spend any more time there!! Would have been nice to see more of Ireland but time just didn't permit, as we were off to Scotland a day after we arrived back in Cambridge!

Love being back on the road again!!