📸 — Glasgow & Edinburgh, Scotland

After Oli’s full recovery from food poisoning, we made our way to Scotland!

Back in July we toured Norway together with our friend Theresa, who flew in from Calgary. We traveled well as a group and kept bugging her to join us again on our little detour and we managed to convince her to join us for our final leg in Scotland!

We met up in Glasgow for just one night (Halloween!) and then made our way Edinburgh for some hiking, exploring and history. There was a lot to see and not enough time… Within the first 48 hours, we all agreed: this is a place we will come back and visit.

Here are our first few days together!

See more on our website www.alittledetour.ca🌏✈️👫

We flew from Ireland to Scotland and were very excited to still see lots of green, and more importantly, no snow.

We landed in Glasgow and did a dinner walking tour and stopped by Central station, and passed a restaurant called “Decent Tandoori”. Cool. At least they’re honest.

For Halloween, we decided to dress up as Canadians! But as soon as we left the house, noticed that Halloween isn’t really a thing here… there was no decorations, hardly anyone dressed up.. and well, we kind of just looked like losers. But! A few people asked if we were American and thought our costumes were funny 😋

We ended up at a very strange bar to play pub quiz. The questions were VERY difficult, and we lost… miserably. We were also 3 of 5 people dressed up in the whole bar.

The next morning we went for breakfast and didn’t believe it when Google recommended we go to Tim Hortons… We didn’t believe it was really there but to our surprise… it was! But we just got doughnuts and had english breakfast somewhere else instead.

We left Glasgow and made our way to Edinburgh. The city is super cool and the medieval influence is very visible the moment you drive into the city limits.

We got to our Airbnb which was the biggest apartment Oli and I have stayed in during our entire year long travel! We had a beautiful view of the city, the university and the beautiful fall colours.

They also had a guitar and Oli was stoked to start jamming.

We turned on some lights and T & O did a foo fighter session. Maeghan was not allowed to video record.

The next day we went to the centre of the city to go an explore Arthur's Seat — a beautiful mountain in the middle of the city filled with locals running, hiking and enjoying the scenery.

“Although the origin of the name is uncertain, some claim that there is a connection between Edinburgh and King Arthur. Arthur’s Seat may have been the location of legendary Camelot.” — — Earth Trekkers!

We were very worried that the weather would be bad... but every day has been 10+ degrees and mostly sunny!

The clouds roll quickly, just as we reached the summit.. it rained for a short 2 min and then the sun came back out

City view.

We walked down Rose Street to find some food, but Oli found this gem of a place that had great drinks, food and dessert!

We got home that night to learn that a hurricane was making its way to the UK….But after a few days of monitoring.. it turned out to just be crazy wind storms.

Day 3 we did our favorite walking tour of Old Town with Sandeman’s. Theresa got a coffee from Starbucks and the cup read Larissa… its kind of close.

Our walking tour was awesome and we learned so much!

There are these areas of the old town that they call “Close” and it is essentially a square or alley that connects all the houses. They would use them to sell things — like the Fish Close, was for the fisherman to sell fish. Our tour guide told us to try and explore as many as possible.

So Theresa picked one.. and we followed her down it, but it turned out to be a rocky hallway that pigeons lived in, there was poop everywhere and they chased Maeghan right out.

We also learned about where the saying “shit face” came from. The wealthy people of Edinburgh would live on the ground level floors of the tall beautiful buildings because the top floors were a fire hazard— so locals would pay more for lower-level apartments, for safety.

But since toilets were not a thing yet… they used chamber pots and would simply yell out the window as the person was dumping them out.

Since this caused much chaos, the city put in a new rule: you can only empty your chamberpots at 7 in the morning, and 10 at night.

Problem is, 10 at night is when the pubs would close. So combine drunk people pouring out onto the streets with people pouring chamberpots out of their windows, and you can picture how you might come home after a night of drinking: shit-faced drunk.

Apparently there are 900 pubs in Edinburgh, and you can almost always find empty kegs on the side of the road waiting to be picked up.

We went to the Grayfriars graveyard, and learned about the grave diggers and the famous Scottish terrier, Bobby!

Also how the science department of the university was paying a pretty penny for bodies to be used in the class room. So if you had a dead body, you could sell it. Of course, people started tracking funerals, and would go in the graveyards at night to steal the fresh bodies. You can’t make this stuff up.

Also stopped by the cafe that was CRAZY full with tourists. So here is a picture of the birth place of Harry Potter. This is where JK Rowling wrote most of the books.

Scotland’s national animal is the Unicorn. And you can find many of them scattered about Edinburgh

Oli found “The red hot chilli pipers”, a bag pipe music cover band, and this is us showing excitement for the local music.

When Queen Victoria visited the Edinburgh castle, she though it didn’t look “castle-y” enough. So this massive front gate was added, relatively recently.

A statue of Sr. William Wallace. Definitely does not look like Mel Gibson.

Crazy detail in each room of the castle. We saw the Crown Jewels, The banquet room where the Black Dinner occurred and is the inspiration for the red wedding in GOT. We also went to the war room which had a section for all the fallen solders of WWI.

On our last night we caught up with an old friend of Maeghan’s from Calgary. Anton homeschooled with Maeghan and we had the chance to discuss politics, homeschooling, the weather and our exotic spouses. ☺️

Oli read poutine on the menu and had to try it. It was not as good as Montreals’

See more on our website www.alittledetour.ca🌏✈️👫