Edinburgh

Thursday was a rather dreary day, all in all:

First of all, when we looked out the window of our London hotel, everyone had their brollies up.

We had to catch the train to Edinburgh at midday, but when we got to Kings Cross and discovered that it was going to cost us about $NZ70 to leave our bags there for a couple of hours, we decided to sit in the waiting room and not bother trying to do anything interesting!

The train itself was fine, with plenty of room for bags, free wireless and a drink & snack trolley coming past every now and then, but about an hour into the journey, we stopped for 45 minutes in the middle of nowhere, so that was very tedious.

Eventually, though, we got to Edinbugh, where Janet's brother David picked us up and took us to his lovely home complete with lovely family. The young children, Eilidh, Hamish and Ishbel, took a while to warm up to us, but within 24 hours the ice was well and truly broken.

When we awoke on Friday morning, we had the house to ourselves, so we had a very lazy morning, and made our way to the local shops to get a bus into town at around lunchtime. We were waylaid by an excellent cafe where three out of four of us had nachos for lunch (I guess we must have really missed Mexican food over the past month).

Despite a very unhelpful bus-driver, we managed to get into town where we came across the National Museum of Scotland, and pretty much the first thing we saw was Jackie Stewart's racing car (or one of them, I guess).

By luck, a free guided tour was about to start, so we joined it and were treated to a wonderful look at women's position in Scottish society over the centuries, as illustrated by various exhibits in the museum. One of our stops was at this Gown of Repentance, which adulturous and promiscuous women were required by the chuch to wear, until they saw the error of their ways!

A quick look around the grounds of Greyfriars, a very helpful bus-driver, and we were back with David, Ruth and the kids.

Perhaps Edinburgh Castle tomorrow...