It was kind of a long trip just for the day - spent many hours half asleep on the bus listening to our driver, Troy, and his playlist of Rihanna, Beyonce and Adele. An odd choice of music if you had seen our driver for sure. The weather turned out to be pretty decent although it looked gray and rainy at first and the causeway and the rope bridge were honestly impressive. The causeway was made by cooling lava - it cools evenly in all directions and something else happens that I forget but that's what gives it the cool hexagonal shapes for the pillars. The rope bridge was pretty cool too but a little shorter than I expected, which is probably good or it might have been freakier! Londonderry was cool from what I saw but we only had about a half an hour or so there, and naturally I spent 20 minutes getting a bowl of potato and leek soup! Yummmm. Got back home around 9pm and then had to rest up for CAROLYN to arrive the next morning!!!!
This whole mini trip Carolyn did to Ireland/Scotland was completely awesome and ridiculous and worked out in spite of our planning and lack of plans...but you'll understand why soon. This crazy girl flew into Dublin at 9:30am (Dublin time, 4:30am NYC time) and grabbed a bus to my little cottage. She got to the bus stop just as I was walking around the corner so to get her attention I naturally yelled "FREEDOM!!!". We relaxed for about 3 hours, drank some tea, ate some bagels, and then packed to go back to the airport to fly to Scotland! We were flying RyanAir for the first time for both of us and it made us a little paranoid - aka weighing our backpacks and getting to the airport about 2 1/2 hours early, both of which were unnecessary. We just sat around delirious for a while and the flight got delayed 45 minutes so we got into Edinburgh at about 8:15, lucked out when the bus to the City Centre came by just as we exited the airport and took the quick half hour ride to Waverly Station, right in the middle of Edinburgh.
That. City. Is. So. Cool. I may be partly biased since Carolyn was with me for this trip but Edinburgh is definitely one of my favorite places, if not my top favorite, of everything I've seen in Europe. We got dropped off on the bridge directly above Waverly Station and everything was lit up in Christmas lights with a ferris wheel and fair going on by Princes St. Our directions to the hostel said to look at Edinburgh Castle and then turn left - and we realized what an awesome place it was when neither one of us was sure which old, awesome, enormous, impressive building was actually the castle. Granted, it was dark, but we honestly picked at least two or three that could have been a castle before realizing where it actually was. The short 15 minute walk to our hostel (also in a wayyyy cool area known as the Grassmarket) was just amazing. The hostel was also very nice and had really friendly staff who suggested a place to eat called Mum's Comfort Food and boy was it comforting! I had bangers and mash (two different kinds of sausage - their original with spices and a special pork and mulled wine blend, plus mashed potatoes with garlic and courgettes aka zucchini in it) and Carolyn had shepherd's pie. Oh my gosh sooooooo good and pretty cheap too.
We made it an early night since Carolyn was all out of whack and I'm just a grandma. We had a 4 person room with only one other girl but she was asleep when we got back and then got up super early to leave the next morning. Either way we got about 9 hours of awesome sleep before grabbing breakfast (best bacon ever!) at the hostel and heading out on a free walking tour with one of the staff around 11am. Our guide was really friendly and helpful and from Australia and there were a total of 5 tourists on the tour so nice and small. At the top of the street our hostel was on, Candlemaker's row, was a cemetery and the remains of a wall that used to divide Scottish and British (I think) with about 80,000 people living inside the walled area.
We saw HOGWARTS aka a really old private, very wealthy school that J.K. Rowling used as inspiration for Hogwarts and was actually believed by townspeople to be a school for wizards and witches way back in the day. Professor McGonagall's name came from the cemetery outside the school as did Tom Riddle (although spelled Riddell so not sure how true that is). We also saw The Elephant House, where JKR wrote The Sorcerer's Stone, and where Carolyn and I later had tea and also wrote Harry Potter...literally, on a napkin. I learned that the meaning of the word "shitfaced" comes from when hundreds of people were crammed into living in an area called the Royal Mile. There was no sewage system yet and everyone threw trash and chamber pot contents out the windows onto the sidewalk. Before tossing something, the person was supposed to yell out a phrase (I forget what) to tell people below to get out of the way and if someone was walking by they could yell "hold your hand!" so they had time to move before getting dumped on. Well, usually the drunk/hungover people coming home in the morning around 10am (when everything was dumped out) would forget or not react quickly enough and quite literally were "shitfaced" when someone emptied the chamber pot on them. Our last big stop was Carlton Hill which gives ridiculous views of Edinburgh - so so so awesome and such a clear day - our tour guide said she didn't even know there was snow on the mountains in the distance because you usually can't see them.
Carolyn's friend Grant, a Scot who did study abroad with Carolyn at UNCW, met up with us at about 2pm and showed us around the city. By that I mean we stopped at a pub to grab a beer and then turned the rest of the day into a pub crawl, with a quick stop at the castle for some pictures. Lots of Irish Coffee, mulled wine, fire punch and hot toddies kept us warm for the next...8-9 hours as we roamed the city and just enjoyed each other's company in freaking Scotland! Fish and chips with cheese and teeny tiny forks turned out to be a great choice on the way back home for the night, again pretty early but one of our "roommates" was already asleep! I think we got into bed around midnight...and then both of us didn't sleep until we had to get up around 5 am thanks to our other roommate returning and a ton of very loud people on the street outside. My alarm failed to go off but thankfully Carolyn checked the time and we made it out the door in about 15 minutes at 5:30am with maybe half an hour of sleep. A fox ran by us as we walked to the bus stop! Thankfully the trip home was pretty easy and we chose to stop back at the cottage - me for a shower, Carolyn for a nap - before going back out and seeing Dublin.
We tried to go on a tour of Trinity College, which AGAIN I missed somehow, but we saw the Book of Kells, a 9th century copy of the four gospels, and that was kind of mindblowing. We had lunch at O'Neill's pub - and will never go back again, even though the food was fine, because it was way too confusing and the tables sucked and there were blacklights in the bathroom stalls. Yes, that's right, the toilets and TP glowed eerily in the lights and it was creepy and kinda gross. The city was pretty packed with Christmas shoppers so we didn't get to many stores before bailing entirely and walking across the Liffey to see O'Connell St and then back around for the Guinness Storehouse. It was really nice to get to the storehouse around 4:30, take our time looking at everything, and then enjoying a pint at the Gravity Bar with a panoramic view of Dublin at night. We had a pub crawl scheduled for later on that evening, but without sleep and after a few long days of traveling, we skipped it and went to The Gotham Cafe (ironic I know) for some delicious pizza and had a glass of mulled wine at a really cute place back in Dundrum called The Port House.
Hot water bottles awaited us at the cottage and Carolyn packed up to leave for NYC this morning (Sunday). I walked her to the bus stop and then promptly went back to sleep until about 2pm and was lazy for the rest of today. Gotta pack my backpack for tomorrow morning when I head to Galway and the Aran Islands for two days but then the last packing I do this week will be to head home!
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