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2001-11-26 - 11:35 a.m. U.K. Day 9: The Royal Mile No, not the lovely Royal Mile pub in Wheaton, but the Royal Mile stretching from one end of Edinburgh to the other. Starts at Edinburgh Castle, ends at Holyrood House. It took Rob quite some time to separate his tired wife from the joys of the feather duvet, wonderfully squishy feather duvet, love the duvet, let me stay with the duvet, and persuade her to tromp out into the Scottish morning. We checked out of the hotel, and walked from the car park to Edinburgh Castle. The view of the town is amazing. Poor castle, like most of the Scotland, the poor castle had been razed, blown up and rebuilt so many times, it's buildings span many centuries. My favorite was the tiny chapel to St. Margaret, an early Scottish queen. The Victorian's improved it a bit, but it's a lovely little respite. The battlements are lined with cannon, which amusingly enough were put there at the behest of Queen Victoria who felt the place needed proper gunnery. Someone had a sense of humor, though, because they supplied the place with front loading ship's cannons. Um, you have to pull those back inside the castle to load them from the front, which means you need a pulley and stop system like you have on ships, except they didn't put that little detail in. So they've never been fired. (Isn't it enough I learn how to spell burgonet? Does my cute husband have to become obsessed with powder weaponry and teach me more and more trivia? Love my tooluser.) Instead, they fire modern field artillery, every day (except Sundays and we were there on a Sunday) at 1 pm. The English tradition was to fire a twelve o'clock gun, but the Scot's thought that was mad - why waste twelve shots when you can fire just one if you wait an hour. Good Scottish thrift was the tour guide's joke. (We will pause to note many famous British engineers were Scottish in descent.) Edinburgh castle also house the Honors of Scotland (the Scottish Crown jewels) and the Stone of Scone. May Mary-Grace forgive me, but the Stone, with it's wild history (including kidnap from Westminster by a bunch of Scottish college students) is more fascinating to me than the crown jewels. From the castle, we ramble down the Royal Mile. Oddbins, an excellent chain liquor store, appears and we wander in to rummage the selection. After much dithering, we decide on a bottle of Glendullan 23. (I wonder if Syr Christian remembers that bottle from Pennsic? The bottle he'd do most anything to have more of ...?) After a bit of exploration, we give up on a real pub and eat at a fine tourist restaurant/coffeehouse, where we watch the teenagers still doing punk, admire the architecture and watch two guys in ski outfits lay on top of their parked van having a wildly animated conversation. I think they were practicing/discussing snowboarding? We stroll further downhill, but I have to admit, I was done. Cranky Theo needed an afternoon nap. After nine days of constantly running from place a to place b, I had no interest in tromping through Holyrood House. We work our way back towards the car, with a stop in the Royal Museum and the Museum of Scotland. (These are two museums next to each other, in fact connecting with each other, that for reasons surpassing my understanding maintain separate collections and staff. Makes no sense, since the only way to go between floors on in the Royal Museum is to walk through the south wall back to the Museum of Scotland and use their stairs.) I was not a good tourist, because I wanted to be a couch potato. Be honest - everyone on vacation has those moments where they'd rather sit still and pet the cat for an hour. Rob puts up with my crankiness admirably, and rushes through the few exhibits he wants to see. Honestly, the museum didn't have much in a medieval vain. We leave Edinburgh in daylight, and drive north to our resting place for the next several days - Kenmore. North past Perth, north, turn right at Baillinaich. Continue west through Aberfeldy (stare at the distillery as we pass by) to Kenmore. A soak in the tub and a very comfortable sofa improve my mood immensely. We finally decide to find a bit of dinner (yum, venison) before collapsing for the (yawn) night � � � 
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