Day 19. Day trip from Glasgow to Edinburgh.

Today: 16.17km.

Today we decided to take a day trip using our Euro rail pass. Edinburgh is the capitol of Scotland and a slight bit more fancy than Glasgow.

We have travel days to use on our rail pass. We each purchased a 10-day pass on the Boxing Day sale. After today we have 4 travel days remaining.

We will be using a travel day to get to Coventry tomorrow, and a day to get from Oxford to London after our walk. We may have 1 day remaining by the end of our trip. We were going to use a pass to get from Portugal to Madrid but we decided to fly instead of take the 11 hour slow train.

Below I will put a map of our rail trips so far from the app. Ignore the line from Spain to Czech Republic, thats a mistake. And we haven’t yet traveled down to England yet that’s my planning for tomorrow.

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In any case, on arrival on the train in Edinburgh we climbed the hill in the direction of Edinburgh Castle.

Below are some gallery photos of the castle. We did some museums here and walked around taking photos of the view. We visited the prisons, armoury, and governors house where the governor still lives in a very public tourist spot.

I have implemented a new plug-in to our blog website which allows you to click on the images in the gallery below to zoom in on the photos! May work better on a desktop PC from my testing. Something that has been driving me mad.

I found the history here very intriguing as the Honours of Scotland are housed here. These are the crown jewels of the reigning monarch of Scotland who is of course now King Charles III. The stone of Scotland will next leave Scotland for the Kings coronation.

I am a big fan of the Tudor period and to know that Queen Mary of Scots lived in this castle was very cool.

Queen Mary of Scots was of course ordered to execution by Queen Elizabeth I. Some of my favourite movies is Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age which Mary Queen of Scots is ordered to execution by an unwilling Queen Elizabeth under great pressure. Queen Elizabeth’s mother was Anne Boleyn and she was ordered to execution by her father King Henry VIII who famously had eight wives and reformed the church to the Church of England so that the King was head of the church and he could grant himself a divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon as the Pope in Rome was not permitting the divorce. This is all in the TV show The Tudors which is a great show.

We were not allowed to take photos of the Honours of Scotland, so I have linked them to wikipedia as you will see.

After the castle, we headed on a walk to find the mountain we saw from the castle. This turned out to be a great walk. It beat any tourist spot we could have found. There will be a lot of photos of this below. But on the way we saw some bag-pipe players.

We first climbed to Arthur’s Seat on Crow Hill. This is at Holyrood Park which is next to Holyrood House which is the King’s royal residence when in Scotland.

We took photos at Arthur’s Seat. It was mighty windy up this hill. Below I will post them.

Next was Salisbury Crags. Here offered more views of the Edinburgh views. I took a scenic view of Mitchell. He was further from the edge than he seems in the image.

Other photos I took include the below gallery.

Below are some videos taken with my iPhone 14 Pro and using the new image stabilisation feature. In these videos I was jogging for some of them and it held very steady. Forgive the wind, it was very windy.

We then headed to a monument to Nelson and his battle at trafalgar.

Also a monument to the fallen Scottish soldiers in Napoleon’s war. We have mentioned Napoleon’s war before when we visited his tomb in Paris. Mitchell particularly liked the Navy battle again the Spanish fleet where Nelson died so this was a fitting visit.

After this was Subway for dinner. We picked up our Subway and headed to the train station. Eating Subway on the way home. It was actually a wonderful day.

Tomorrow we get up at 5am and board a train to Coventry. On the train tomorrow I plan to remind myself of some of my family history of ancestors from Glasgow and may write a supplemental blog about it, particularly for my Grandma who has helped look after my house and dogs while away.