Thursday we visited the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and it was wild. I don’t really know what to say about this, so here is a lake:

Here are some pictures of Rhododendrons for my dad!

And finally some random shots of the gardens!

That’s all for the gardens. Today I took my first real train ride, from Edinburgh to Inverness, a town on the edge of Loch Ness. Train rides are sweeeeeet, saw some great views and what not, and I was sitting at a table and everything. It looks like tomorrow I’ll finally get my photo with Nessie!

The past week we spent in town. I saw a whole lot of the city, ate some fish and chips, went out a couple nights. Last night after dark we walked to the top of the hill the city’s observatory is on — absolutely beautiful! It doesn’t get completely dark at night during the summer here. That and the streetlights let me see the city a whole new way.

Anyway, we spent time just walking through the city as well as seeing specific sights. It’s really gorgeous here; most of the buildings adhere to a particular style, there are building codes regulating the hight of structures, and its unbelievably clean. So here is a pretty random assortment of what all I ran into. I’ll start with some random shots of streets I liked a lot. The first one is right outside Justin’s house, on the way to Arthur’s Seat.

This next is above Waverly Bridge, where I first got off the airport shuttle in Edinburgh.

Walking in town, we passed a couple parks, a few graveyards, and a lot of churches. Here are two churches I especially liked:

The graveyards are peppered randomly around the city, the oldest stone’s I saw were from the early 1800’s. Here’s a shot of one cemetery:

One of the specific sights we stopped at was an Admiral Nelson memorial. This was a stone tower, resembling a light house or something, on top of a hill overlooking the center of town.

It cost 3 pounds to climb this thing, so here are the first views I paid for. (The only ones, so far) The first is a shot over the top of the hill. The monument there, a Greek looking something-or-other, was absolutely gigantic. I’m not sure what it was a monument to. The second is a shot of the main drag in Edinburgh, Prince’s Street.

You can see the castle again in that photo, on the hill to the left of the street. Down in town I got a couple real good shots looking up the hill toward Edinburgh Castle.

And finally, a piece of statuary I liked a lot:

We also visited some museums, gardens and such. I’m saving a post about those in case we visit more. This weekend at some point we are going to try to get up to Lock Ness or the Island of Skye, hopefully that happens! I’ll put it all here, if it does!

Monday and Tuesday I went on some walking tours through Edinburgh and got to see a lot of the city. I think I’ll break this into two posts…

The first thing we did Monday was climb Arthur’s Seat, a large piece of highland hill in the center of the city providing some wonderful views. Here is a view of the hill from below.

There are some real neat exposed rock faces around the hill too, I guess called crags:

It was a pretty good hike up the hill, but beautiful! Here’s a s hot of the hillside going up, and a lake on the hill.

The top of the hill rewarded us with some great views of the city! It was also extremely windy, ha. Here are some shots from up top.

In this picture you can see the crags on the left, as well as central city and Edinburgh Castle. Most of the castle’s structure date to the 16th century, though some of the site goes back to the 12th century.

Here’s the castle from Arthur’s Seat:

On the way off the hill, back down into town, we walked along the top of the crags for a while. Here’s one photo from that.

So from here, we wandered down into the city and Justin took me sight-seeing for the afternoon. I’ll put that up as soon as I have my photos together!