Edinburgh and the banks are closed...

Monday, 25th April - (Catch-up)

We had understood from people here that Easter Monday wasn't a holiday in Scotland, and Liz's kids had gone back to school, but when we got the train in to the city, (about 20 minutes), many shops were open, but a lot weren't. And the banks were closed!! I had wanted to transfer the balance of some accommodation to a place in Sandwich, but couldn't do it today.

So, we opted to take a city tour on one of those open topped double decker buses. We hadn't done this  last time and had missed seeing a few things. We got Seniors fares again, and took the tour to the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. These are really lovely and worth the praise they get, so we had quite a while there looking at Trilliums, and other bulbs, and some lovely alpine plants. There is an enormous tropical glasshouse but this is not our thing, so we decided not to pay the entry fee, and skipped this. Then went down to Leith and the harbour where the old Royal yacht Britania is on permanent display. It was one of those get-on/get-off tours, so we had a look at the yacht, and then had a really nice lunch in the Ocean Terminal shopping centre, and shared a very simple pizza and some really nice Italian beer.

The bus is easy to negotiate the steps up and down as you can steady yourself on the rails, and we went on to Holyrood Palace, which we also hadn't done last time. But they wanted 14 Pounds each to get in and we were by this stage very tired and so just had a cuppa, and went back and got the next bus back to Waverley Station