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Day 11 : Last Night in Edinburgh

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 We woke up early (for us) and walked 25 minutes to Edinburgh Castle. Unfortunately, the tickets to tour the castle were sold out. Apparently, we were supposed to have booked several days in advance. Who knew? We’ll hit it next time. That was our big plan for the day, so we had to improvise. We made our way down the street to St Giles Cathedral to take some pictures. We’d been in Europe for almost 2 weeks, and still hadn’t gone into any big old cathedrals. We picked a good one.

We stopped in a small shop for some coffee and pastries. There was a book exchange with a strange looking book called Bored of the Rings. It’s a Lord of the Rings parody. They let us take it because Kaylea couldn’t get through reading the summary without laughing. After that, we went into a few shops to look for some souvenirs. We weren’t looking too hard. There just really wasn’t a lot more to do than shop since our plans had been thrown off.


It was around this time that Aaron realized that we hadn’t received an email to check in for our flight the next day. Aaron paced back and forth inside a small clothing store trying to get checked in on his phone. There was an alert that our flights could be impacted by cancellations or delays, and one of the flights was showing up red, but there was no other information. We started getting nervous, but we still had time to figure it out. We decided to go to an art museum around the corner before we head back to the hotel to see if we could get everything sorted out.



On the way to the art museum, Kaylea spotted a place called The Edinburgh Dungeon. The man at the counter described it as a cross between a fun house and a historical tour. We decided to check it out. It was definitely more of a fun house. It was a lot of actors with thick and  surprisingly terrible Scottish accents talking about witch trials, the plague, torture, murder, and general dark things from Scottland’s history. It was pretty fun! Kaylea was forced to dance by one of the actors at the beginning of the whole thing, but the actors ended up heckling almost everyone, so it was pretty funny. The experience ended with a ride at the “gallows” where all the seats drop about 40 feet. 



The dungeon lasted a little longer than we expected, but we made our way back to see if we could figure out our next flights. Aaron spent about an hour between his laptop, his phone, and sitting on hold before realizing that they just weren’t going to let us check in online. We had to show up for our flight a little earlier than we would have normally. So, instead of having to leave at 7am, we were going to have to leave at 6:30. By this time it was already starting to get close to dinner, and we were pretty tired from walking around over the past few days. We decided to take our last night in Edinburgh a bit easy. We caught up on the blog. We ordered room service. We watched some Stranger Things, and we prepared ourselves for the 18-19 hour travel journey we had ahead of ourselves.

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