Day 39

Today we had the morning/afternoon until 3 to ourselves in Edinburgh before we had to leave again. The four of us took the morning to walk over to Edinburgh Castle and check it out. Our hostel was conveniently located right by the Royal Mile, which is the street that leads right to the castle. We went to the castle and walked around it, got a short guided tour, looked at the crown jewels, saw the dog cemetery, and then were pretty much done with that. The trouble with cramming a bunch of sights all together is that after a while they just start to all look the same. This is a tragedy because most of these places are really cool, but I am getting to the point where I just don’t really care anymore. But I have also been to the castle before, so I didn’t feel too bad. After this we decided to walk all the way to the other end of the Royal Mile and visit Holyrood Palace. This is the place where the queen stays when she is staying in Edinburgh. Of all the state rooms I have visited on this trip so far (and believe me, there have been a lot) I think they were my favorite. It was a pretty short and sweet tour that wasn’t too ridiculously detailed but still gave you plenty of information. At the very end of the tour you go into this room to hand back in your audio guides and they have all these pictures of the queen and her family. So cute! My favorite is one of her at about the age of 2 sitting in a window sill, it was adorable. After this sight-seeing we went to get lunch before going back to the hostel. We couldn’t decide where to go and were all really hungry- so we ended up at Pizza Hut again. It was cheap and we knew we liked it so it worked out well. Then we had to go back and get our luggage from the luggage room in the hostel and load it on the bus.

When we got there I noticed what looked like water had spilled on the ground, but I wasn’t too worried about it because I thought my bags were on a shelf. But my one bag was not. In fact, it was on its side and it got all wet. I still wasn’t too worried because I just thought it was water and it would dry- but I was wrong! Let me give you some more detail before I continue. So I bought a little bag to put my stuff in for this week so I could just leave my big suitcase on the bus and not have to worry about it. But the night before when unloading the bus there was so much chaos that they just got all the bags off and brought them into the hostel, so I ended up having my bug suitcase as well as my smaller bag. So the big one- the one I didn’t even want in the first place- is the one that got wet. After I got it out of the room I opened it to get Robyn’s pillow out to give to her because she had stored it in there. It was at that time I realized that it was not water, but in fact some kind of alcohol that had soaked her pillow and some of my clothes and now my whole bag smelled like sick gross alcohol. Joy.

But besides the bag-smelling incident all was well. We got back onto the coach and were off to York! This took a while but we finally got there safe and sound. I was glad to be in a place for more than one night (we were there for two). I unpacked my suitcase and febreezed everything in sight, showered, and was off to bed.