Weekend Getaway

This weekend I travelled outside Ireland for the first time since I have been here! We spent the weekend in Edinburgh, Scotland. For those of you who are wondering like I was, it is pronounced Eden-bruh. I have been looking forward to this trip for a while because my family is Scottish. I've done projects on my family history so I was excited to see the place where my family and last name came from.

We left EARLY Friday morning and by early I mean we were on our way to the airport at 4:40am. Although it was a rough morning, it was worth it because we had all day Friday to explore Edinburgh. One of the great things about Edinburgh is that there is so much to see just by walking down the street, so you don't have to spend a lot of money to get good views. I was surprised at how different the architecture was compared to Ireland. There is more stone and a more gothic influence on the buildings. While we were walking around Friday we saw a pub crawl with free alcohol for only 7 pounds so obviously we had to. The three hours of sleep caught up to us so we called it quits early but we still went to 5 out of the 7 pubs/clubs.

On Saturday we took a tour of the Edinburgh Castle. There is a street that leads up to the castle that is a hub for restaurants and shops called the Royal Mile. The castle is unique in the fact that it sits on top of an extremely steep hill so it is raised up above the city. This castle is unreal, its more like a small city. There are cobble stone roads within the castle roads that links together all the various buildings. I think my favorite part was seeing where the prisoners were kept because they explained very in depth why prisoners would be kept there and what their day to day lives would look like. You could just feel the history behind it all.

Our flight was late on Sunday evening so we were able to spend most of the day in the city. We decided to climb the Scott Monument which is an extremely tall gothic building with almost 300 steps to the top. The monument was built for writer Sir Walter Scott and is the largest monument for a writer in the world. The 297 steps are tiny triangles that loop and loop all the way to the top. Inside the stair case the walls are tight and short making it a bit claustrophobic. However, the view at the top is worth the stress of getting there. You can see over the entire city in every direction. After the monument we wanted to reward ourselves so we stopped in at a dessert restaurant that specializes in all things chocolate. The menu had everything from waffles to crepes to fondue to ice cream. Literally anything chocolately you can think of was on there. I decided to go with dark chocolate fondue that came with an array of fruits and marshmallows then if that wasn't enough I got a side of white chocolate ice cream. It was definitely worth the hour wait that we had. Once our chocolate was finished we walked around the city and popped in and out of cute little gift shops.

All in all it was a weekend well spent and Edinburgh has a piece of my heart.