Edinburgh, Day 3 (4/15/26)

After our (half) marathon walking day the day before, we were more than a little thrilled that we'd thought to plan a rest day, full of experiences, but not so much walking. We had stumbled upon Candlemaker's Row on our first day, while we were meandering through the city to get our bearings, so we knew just where to go for our Islander Bag Experience.

Here's a much better picture of Greyfriars Bobby.
You can see the damage that tourists have caused
by insisting on touching his nose "for luck".

I had been looking forward to building my own bag for months. The funny thing is, I rarely carry a purse, and when I do, it's a concealed carry purse, so to be excited to make one was not very like me. Jay is game to do just about anything while on vacation and he's pretty secure in his masculinity, so he wasn't worried about going to make a bag for himself.

So many options!

Once everyone got up into the craft room, we were given a quick introduction, then turned loose for about ten minutes to choose our pieces. It's a good thing that we were limited to ten minutes, because I could have stayed up at the counter for hours trying different combinations without ever making a decision. Red is my favorite color, and I'd planned on making a red bag, but the options weren't great for red. Instead, a gorgeous blue caught my eye.

All the pieces gathered, now to assemble.

The instructors were great with their instructions and helped us build our bags, step-by-step. After each step, they cruised each table and made adjustments as needed.

Jay was hoping for Iowa Hawkeyes colors, but
they didn't have any, so he opted for earthtones.

When I booked, I thought there was no way that an entire room full of people would be able to assemble their own bags in an hour, but the instructors have this class down to a science, and before we knew it, our bags were complete. It was fun to look at everyone's bags as they made them, and to see how different they each looked just by changing the accessories. I'll admit, there were combinations that I wish I'd thought of.

The blue was a very popular color. At least three people at our
table chose blue.

I've read some reviews that complain that the screws back out over time, but Jay and I have a plan for that: red loctite. I'll use my bag for fun special occasions, and Jay has turned his bag into his travel art kit. So far, we haven't had any issues with the screws. We were each given a repair kit with extra screws and a screwdriver, and a dust cover for storage of our bags. Overall, I was thrilled with the whole experience.

Our next experience was one that Jay chose within a couple of weeks of us deciding to travel to Scotland. Honestly, Scotland was never on his bucket list of places to visit, but it was my turn to choose, so he started looking for things that he'd want to do to make the best of it. Once he found Afternoon Tea, he started looking forward to the trip. And, oh boy, did he find Afternoon Tea! He watched video after video of reviews of different teas around the city and settled on the one at Signet Library. It's the most expensive and highest rated tea in Edinburgh, so he had very high expectations.

This amazing staircase greeted us in the
entryway. 

It might have been gauche to take a selfie,
but we had to commemorate the event.

The library was absolutely gorgeous, filled with shelves of old law tomes in each alcove. The tables were spread out enough to give each party a sense of privacy, and they even had tables tucked into some of the alcoves. 

The tabletops had a mirror over the table cloth, and the tea sets
were sterling silver.

While we waited for our food, we were served our beverages. Jay chose a flat white coffee, and I chose a tea that I didn't love. Luckily, they were very gracious about changing out teas, and I ended up with one that was astounding.

Look at how beautiful this berry hibiscus tea is!

I am not a tea drinker, but this was amazing.

Apparently, I've just been drinking the wrong
teas all along, because this was heaven.

We started off with an Amuse Bouche of tomato and red pepper soup that was exquisite. It seemed, right from the start, that our high expectations were going to be met and then some.

When our savory stand arrived, we were speechless, everything was so masterfully made and presented. I'm a notoriously picky eater, but being married to Jay has cured me somewhat. I will never be an adventurous eater, but I'm more open to trying new foods (as long as he can explain to me what it is, lol).

• Top tray:
• Haggis, Neeps, and Tatties tart
• Pao de Quieio, Romesco, and Almonds
• Middle tray:
• French Onion Veloute and Toasted Brioche
• Squash, Carrot, and Halloumi cake
• Salmon Roulade
• Bottom tray:
• Sweet Potato and Pesto Focaccia
• Miniature Pork Burger

Knowing what haggis is made of, I was nervous to give it a try, but thought that if I was going to try it anywhere, a fancy afternoon tea was my best bet for getting good haggis. I was right, and I really enjoyed the little tartlet. I would have eaten an entire pie of this.

Proof that I tried the haggis.

I'm not a fan of fish, so I passed on the salmon, which was a good choice. It was Jay's least favorite item presented, so if that was the case, I definitely wasn't going to like it. I also passed on the pork burger, because I was stuffed. The thought of putting another savory bite in my mouth was nauseating.

They cleared the stand, refreshed our drinks, and then the sweet stand arrived. Just like the savories, it was full of edible artwork. Despite being absolutely stuffed, I knew I had to have a bite of everything on the trays. Our server suggested that we start with the bottom tray and work our way up, so we did.

• Bottom tray:
• Plain Scone with Clotted Cream and Strawberry Jam
• Fruit Scone
• Middle tray:
• Chocolate and Salted Caramel Fondant Tart
• Sweet Potato cake
• Limoncello Baba with Pistachio Crema
• Top tray:
• Coconut Mojito with Champagne Caviar
• Oreo Mousse with mini Macaron

I was underwhelmed with the scones, but that's probably because Jay has spoiled me rotten with his. Or, I was just so miserably full that they felt heavy. It was probably a combination of the two.

Not to worry, though, because the middle and top trays more than made up for the mediocre scones. Being so full, it was an effort to try one bite of everything, but I dug deep and managed, even if I was embarrassed by my plate at the end.

My plate as I worked my way through
the middle tray. By the end, it was piled high
with half-eaten desserts.

While my plate was embarrassing, Jay's was immaculate. He cleaned up every crumb so that he'd have the perfect background for each of his photos.

They could have taken his plate to the back
and put it immediately back into service, it
was so clean.

They whisked away our sweets stand, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Everything was amazing, but this girl's stomach was past miserable. However, we weren't done yet. Oh, no. We had one last item - a palate cleanser of Pineapple Sorbet.

My great-grandma always told me that ice
cream melts down and fills up the cracks, so
with that in mind, I found room.

I was in a food stupor when we left the library, and I honestly cannot recall what we did between afternoon tea and our last experience of the day, a ghost tour. I suspect a nap was involved.

The evening sky looked like a painting when we were walking up the Royal Mile to meet our tour guide. I told Jay that the sky reminded me of the painted ceiling at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, with the blues and pinks.

It was a shame that we didn't have such a beautiful sky the previous night, for our hike up to Arthur's Seat.

I love a good ghost tour, and this was a good one. We opted not to do the more popular Real Mary King's Close, and instead chose the Underground City of the Dead tour, which took us through the South Bridge Underground.

The only picture I took, in the first room we ventured into.
Skeleton prop courtesy of Amazon, lol.

Twenty-some years ago, on my first trip to Edinburgh with my friends, we'd taken an underground tour, and it might have been this one, but I don't remember enough about it to be sure. Our guide was entertaining, and a gifted storyteller. The history of the underground vaults is tragic, it's no wonder they're so haunted. Jay doesn't believe in ghosts - at all - but I do. I spent a lot of my young childhood in a house with ghosts. Despite not believing in ghosts, Jay did have to admit that he felt a full-body chill right before the lady standing next to him said she felt the little boy's ghost touch her arm. I felt a tiny, pinprick sensation on my ankle once or twice, but nothing like a hand laying on my arm or holding my hand.

The stories the guide told us were the ultimate in campfire ghost stories, and had we not been able to leave the vaults and go back to our room, I wouldn't have slept a wink!

I'm not sure how we managed it on our low-key rest day, but we still recorded over 29,000 steps (11.53 miles). Our ghost tour was less than a mile, so maybe in my food fugue state, Jay and I wandered the city.

Edinburgh, Day 2, Part 2 (4/14/26)

The chocolate tour gave us renewed energy to keep moving for a bit longer, but we knew that if we stopped for too long, we'd never get started again and would miss sunset from Arthur's Seat. There was another little garden (they're everywhere) tucked in a close just down the street from our ApartHotel, so we set off to find it.

It didn't take long, Dunbar's Close Garden was down the Royal Mile, on the way to Holyrood Palace, not even a half a mile from where we were staying.

It was such a pretty little garden tucked just 20 yards or so off the Mile, but it would have been so easy to miss if we weren't specifically looking for it. Since the close was on the way to Holyrood Palace, and the trailhead for Arthur's Seat was near there, we thought we walk down that way a bit so we'd know how much time to give ourselves to get there when we were ready to start our sunset hike. And, also to keep moving. If we had gone back to our room for "a rest" we would have slept clean through to the next day.

The trailhead for Arthur's Seat was pretty easy, so we climbed back up the hill in search of dinner. We found a local cidery pub, The BrewDog. They, at least, acknowledged us unlike the pub the night before, and we slid into a booth. We both saw the QR code at the end of the table and sighed heavily, thinking we were going to have a similar experience. Just as Jay scanned the QR code, though, an actual waiter showed up! A human being, bearing waters, and most importantly, was human. We didn't have to order and pay via that damn QR code. Our faith in the Edinburgh pub culture was tentatively restored.

On the menu, they offered an adult "Hoppy" meal. I couldn't pass it up.

It came with a burger, chips (fries), a beverage, and a prize. The prize was a BrewDog pin that I stuffed somewhere in a coat pocket and haven't seen since.

The food hit the spot after being on the move all day, and only having chocolate for lunch. The cider went down pretty smoothly as well. I ordered it thinking it would make the upcoming hike a little less daunting. It did, until we actually started the hike. lol.

We're both fairly fit people, and we live at altitude, so I truly thought that it would be no big deal to hit both a sunrise and a sunset hike in the same day at sea level. Boy, was I wrong.

I was tired, my feet were sore, and I was cold. It had been raining off and on all day, and while I anticipated it, the cold seeped into my bones and I spent the day chilled. Nonetheless, we only had this one evening to do the sunset hike, so off we went.

Once we got off the pavement and onto the trail, we both found a bit more energy as we headed up. There are multiple ways up to the summit, and we saw some people doing a bit of a scramble. We decided that doing a scramble would make it feel more like a hike and less like a walk, so we followed the trail that went to the scramble.

It was short, hardly a scramble, but it felt more like hiking, and buoyed both our moods. I'm glad we took the trail branch that headed toward the rocks, because there was a really cool chapel ruins that we got to explore.

Soon enough, we were back on the trail, headed for the summit. We stopped about halfway up. Our excuse was to take a picture, but the real reason was that we were completely gassed and needed a moment to get our shit in a pile.

The scenery was gorgeous, though.
Despite being exhausted, we could appreciate the beauty.

On any normal day at home, this little jaunt up the hill wouldn't have even caused us to sweat, but this hill walk, as they call hiking in Scotland, made us dig deep. We did it. We summitted, and it wasn't yet time for sunset.

The views were so very different. Looking back toward the city, you could see all of the architecture and feel the history. Turning around to look in the opposite direction, you have the water. It's really hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that Edinburgh is essentially a coastal city.

When we got to the summit, I found a rock to sit down on and it was the most perfect summit rock I've ever put my butt on. It was formed just right, and the rock behind was the perfect backrest. It was like sitting in a La-Z-Boy.

This is the face of a very, very happy
GunDiva.

Unfortunately, even though we made it before sunset, the clouds were thick and we realized we weren't going to get to see sunset and we headed back down. Returning from the summit of any hike is always easier than going up, so the trip down was great. What wasn't so great was getting to the bottom of the hike and realizing that we had to walk UP the Royal Mile to our room. That little bit was purely trudging along.

We ended the day with more than 35,000 steps (13.6 miles - we completed a half marathon!), which turned out to be the most steps per day of the entire trip. When Jay said that we'd use our time in Edinburgh to leg up for our hikes in the Highlands, he wasn't kidding!

Edinburgh, Day 2, Part 1 (4/14/26)

Jay had just three things on his "must do" list for Edinburgh. 1) Sunrise at Calton Hill, 2) Sunset from Arthur's Seat, and 3) Afternoon Tea.

We thought it would be appropriate to do both the sunrise and sunset hikes on the same day, so our day started before sunrise. Calton Hill was just a few minutes' walk from our ApartHotel, and we set off bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I'd checked the route on Google Maps and there was a 'stairs' notice on the route. We didn't think anything about it, because there are so many stairs in Edinburgh that we thought it was kind of a silly notice.

Oh man, we should have paid attention.

"Jacob's Ladder" stairs

Just like Fleshmarket close reminded us of the stairs in Bellagio, these stairs reminded us of the stairs from Positano to Nocelle, Italy to get to Path of the Gods (Sentiero degli Dei). I don't know if it was doing it on fatigued legs, or the fact that we couldn't see the end of the stairs, or something else. Luckily, there are only 144 stairs in Jacob's Ladder, compared to the 1,500+ stairs to Path of the Gods. Either way, it was a small mental hurdle to get up these stupid stairs.

The good thing was that the trailhead (if you could call it that) was less than a block from the end of the stairs and before we knew it, we were at the top of Calton Hill with plenty of time before the sunrise.

They had this area cordoned off, but some brave strangers
ignored the fencing and gave us a great photo op.

Waiting in the brisk pre-dawn morning

Good morning, Sun.

We wandered around the hill for a bit before heading back down for a quick coffee for Jay and a chai for me at The Milkman, a tiny, Instagram-famous coffee shop in Edinburgh. Because it was so early, we had time to kill before the coffee shop opened, so we walked by the Scott Monument and revisited Victoria Street

Scott Monument

Pro tip: get up much earlier than the other tourists to get pictures
of amazing places without the crowds.

Seven a.m. finally rolled around and Jay was able to get his coffee from The Milkman. The chai was one of the best I've had, and we ended up visiting the next day as well.

We took our time exploring, and headed through Prince's Street garden to Dean Village. Since I'm not a fan of cities, finding these little pockets of gardens made me happy. 

It's hard to believe, when walking through the garden, that the road is just above us. We're no more than 100 feet from the roadway. The cherry trees might not have been blossoming in The Meadow, but they were in full bloom on Prince's Street. The air smelled so amazing.

We crossed Dean Bridge into Dean Village. 

Originally, we'd planned on walking in the gardens, but found out that they were private, so we decided to explore. We turned down a street and noticed that there were police and what looked like highway construction workers, but didn't think anything about it. We noticed a man up on a ladder next to a stone wall, putting what looked like small tree branches up all around the CCTV cameras and commented that their camouflage was much better than ours on our cell towers, then kept walking. Jay pointed out that there was a horse ahead and I was very excited to see it. I told him all about the horsebox, and how I want one for Skeeter. It would be so much easier than hooking up the truck and trailer. I had a passing thought of going up to see if I could pet the horse, but the area was so busy that we turned down the next street, which was lined with lorries.

It was only then that we realized we'd inadvertently crashed a movie or tv set. We spent a few minutes debating which it was and I decided it was the Harry Potter tv show based on the huge jars of candies I saw on the back of one of the lorries.

These look like they belong in Honeydukes Sweet Shop.

After we left the set, we found ourselves at the Dean Village Cemetery. Even though it was gorgeous, I was a bit disappointed that some of the grave plots were so new (late 1900s). As we moved further into the cemetery, we finally found some plots from the 1800s. I guess I just expected everything to be much older.

Eventually, we found the entrance to the Water of Leith path and enjoyed the scenery. Again, bits of nature tucked away in a city. It's every bit as gorgeous as all of the Instagram pictures.

By this time, we were getting hungry. We'd burned off our shared pastry and our stomachs were telling us to find food. Honestly, our feet were getting a little tired, too, so heading back into Edinburgh proper was more of a trudge. On the way back, we took a little detour into a church that had a community garden, and my hippie self was so happy with that.

When we got to the Grassmarket and found a place for breakfast, it was 9:30 a.m. and we'd walked almost six and a half miles. No wonder our feet were tired.

After breakfast, we had a bit before our reservations as The Chocolatarium. This was a "last-minute" add on to our itinerary after Jay took a virtual walk via Google Earth. What a great find this was! At home, there is a bean-to-bar chocolate store where we have done a mini tour, so when he found out we could do a tour at a bean-to-bar chocolate factory in Scotland, we couldn't wait to go. So, despite tired bodies and feet, we hauled ourselves to the tour.

Our ApartHotel was really rather well-placed
on the Royal Mile. The Chocolatarium was
maybe a block and a half from us.

The retail shop had lots of different chocolates for sale,
and they had a wide variety made in Scotland.

The tour started with the most amazing hot chocolate I'd ever put in my mouth. It was 51% dark chocolate and warm oat milk. It was silky and wonderful, and if the tour had ended with just the hot chocolate samples, I would have walked away a happy woman.

Alas, we sat in the "jungle" room with several other guests and learned about the history of chocolate, which was interesting, then we moved into the "kitchen" to make our own bars. It was explained how they took the beans and turned them into the lovely chocolate we got to make. Hanging on the walls by each work station were different molds to choose from, along with a variety of different mix-ins so we could personalize our chocolate bars.

While we waited for our chocolates to set up, we moved into the tasting room, where we got to try chocolates from around the world as our guide explained the history of chocolate, along with the differences between dark, milk, and white. She also explained why, to someone from the UK, Hershey's chocolate tastes like "sick" (vomit). It's because butyric acid is used as a milk stabilizer for Hershey's, but is not used in the UK. Super interesting.

If we would have had more time, I would have tried every
piece they had.

After learning about the history of chocolate, and sampling roughly a quarter of my body weight in it, our bars were set and ready for us.

Jay came up with much more creative names for his
chocolates than I did, but it didn't matter, because they
all tasted amazing over the next few days.

Holy cow, this post is getting almost as long as that day was. I'll finish up this day with a Part II. Day 3 will likely be a multi-part set of short(er) posts, then we get into the Highlands, in which we didn't pack as many adventures into each day.