Edinburgh and The Orange Tree

Our two nights in Edinburgh were pretty good. It was great to be back among English speakers and to watch TV! But that’s not all we did. Although it was really nice to just spend some time relaxing.

Both nights we went to dinner at Mum’s comfort food restaurant, which I think used to be called Monster Mash, and specializes in Bangers and mash. I was very tasty.

On the second day. We went to see Edinburgh castle and unfortunately there was a long queue. It would have been smarter to have got our tickets online or at the tourism info centre first, but none of us thought about that. We got inside in time to see the 1 o clock gun being fired and then I split up from the other two go have some lunch. We caught up later though. My favorite parts were seeing the royal jewels and the stone of destiny, and the national war memorial has some lovely carving and glass windows too.

We quite liked tourist shopping and Star bought some gloves from a pretty store called Ness. I got my little niece a dress and a mini kilt, not very authentic, but pretty cute. I hope she can fit it!

We enjoyed just walking around town, and we popped into the library so that Star (who is a librarian) could see how they ran things there. We were impressed by the blow-up dalek that they had in there.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time there to stay for any of the festival things that were just starting up, so maybe I will have to go back again sometime.

After Edinburgh we took a train to Oxenholm because Svendlemouse’s brother in law’s mother and her husband lived near there in Kirkby Lonsdale. We stayed one night with them and it is a really lovely town.

We had a good walk around and got to see Devil’s bridge and Ruskin’s view which was famously painted by an artist and declared a ‘beautiful view’ which had a ‘perfect balance’ of river, field, sky etc. It was very beautiful, and funny because there was a stripy building painted all colours, like an allsorts lolly, because the owner had been denied a building consent due to the fact it might ruin the view… So he decided to ruin it anyway by painting this existing building! It looks kinda cool though.

For dinner we went to The Orange Tree Hotel pub. It was a very cool rugby pub with yummy food and you could get a sampling of the beers from their micro brewery arranged on a platter shaped like tree, and the glasses were the oranges.

The next morning we also got to Skype with Svendlemouse’s sister, brother in law and baby niece. It was lovely to see them and his little niece is so cute and cheerful!

Now we are on the way to Hay on Wye for a few days.

As a side note: I am currently reading The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which is very good, and playing Tiny Wings on my iPad a lot.