First Edinburgh Outing

All riiiight! First full day in this city. Time to see some fancy bricks ‘n’ stuff.

Let’s get crankin’. But first: BREAKFAST.

We found a cafe in the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, and ate a buffet breakfast sitting at the windows, with the bikes parked outside in view. As usual, lots of pedestrians stopped to scope out the recumbents, look confused, then move on.

Since we had to switch hotels in the evening, we had all our touring gear packed back on the bikes. It was annoying but we got by.

After that we took a little browse around the gallery.

From there we set out, pedaling randomly around the city. Sometimes we’d stick together, other times we’d split off.

Nick lingered in a park for a while and saw an adorable kid feeding birds.

We all converged at the North Bridge, and encountered a lively two-man band entertaining the crowd.

Andrew approved of the band, though I could kinda tell he would rather be on foot than hauling all this touring gear around the city.

We crossed the bridge and headed for the High St, and there we had our first sighting of the Edinburgh Childrens Hospital Charity Pipers.

They walked from place to place in a big group, stopping at arranged locations and giving 15-minute performances. We saw them half a dozen times at least.

It looked like great fun, and they collected a decent amount of cash too.

The extra flourishes some of the drummers made were cool. Were they traditional, or improvised moves? I didn’t know.

We walked the bikes on the High Street. The crowds were just ludicrous.

Every three blocks or so, a different person was stationed, playing the bagpipes. The effect was almost spiritual, like after 700 years of the instrument playing in this region (possibly as much as 3000 years), the sound of bagpipes was infused into the very stones and just vibrated out like heat.

Sometimes they were deployed a little too close to each other, and the overlap created weird harmonics.

We split up again and explored some more. The city was overflowing with detail, in structures large and small.

In the evening we converged again for dinner.

Dinner was followed by dessert, because calories are meaningless on a bike tour!

The new hotel was on the north side of town, and our room was up three flights of stairs. There was no elevator, so we had to haul the bikes all the way.

When we settled in, the extra height was refreshing though. I opened the windows and was treated to a night time performance:

We were in this hotel for a couple of days, so we could leave our gear on the floor for a change.