Scotland 2023
Table Of Contents
- First Edinburgh Outing July 1, 2023
- Chores In Edinburgh July 2, 2023
- Castle and Cannons July 3, 2023
- Dinner With Friends July 4, 2023
- Departures and Arrivals July 5, 2023
- Edinburgh Gardens July 6, 2023
- Arthur’s Seat July 7, 2023
- North Past The Forth Bridge July 8, 2023
- Spooooky Cemetery Action July 9, 2023
- A Short Train To A New Town July 10, 2023
- A Cool Cafe In A Cool Town July 11, 2023
- Glasgoooo July 12, 2023
- Here In The Hebrides July 13, 2023
- Do Not Feed The Ponies July 14, 2023
- To The Isle of Benbecula July 15, 2023
- Across North Uist July 16, 2023
- Skipping To The Isle of Harris July 17, 2023
- To The Isle Of Skye July 18, 2023
- Kilt Rock And Bridal Falls July 19, 2023
- Rough Roads And Rugged Sheep July 20, 2023
- Skye Bridge And Train To Inverness July 21, 2023
- Back To Edinburgh July 22, 2023
- Castle Windows And Patches July 23, 2023
- Last Scotland Day July 24, 2023
First Edinburgh Outing
July 1, 2023 Filed Under Curious
All riiiight! First full day in this city. Time to see some fancy bricks ‘n’ stuff.
Ready for more random riding!
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.
Everyone loves the recumbents!
After that we took a little browse around the gallery.
Sir Walter Scott, poet and author.
Dr Elsie Maud Inglis, pioneer of medical education for women.
Super cool mosaic.
Flora MacDonald in the gallery.
From there we set out, pedaling randomly around the city. Sometimes we’d stick together, other times we’d split off.
The tram line through the center of Edinburgh.
I guess if you’re gonna make a bunch of houses all the same, this is a pretty good style for it.
Info in Coates Crescent Gardens.
Anybody need a light?
Proper sun protection is important.
TEMPTING TATTIE. They’ve got baked potatoes!
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!
“Man, I dunno about this ‘riding everywhere’ business.”
We crossed the bridge and headed for the High St, and there we had our first sighting of the Edinburgh Childrens Hospital Charity Pipers.
One of the energetic street performers.
The Edinburgh Childrens Hospital charity pipers!
Now here’s a dude with lungs.
Pipin’ for charity.
Put yer coins in the bucket!
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.
The Royal Mile is by far the busiest street in Edinburgh.
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.
Pipin’ for lunch money.
Pipin’ for the heck of it.
We split up again and explored some more. The city was overflowing with detail, in structures large and small.
Elk with shields? Why not!
This is one of the single most amazing pieces of topiary I’ve come across.
No idea what this is doing in Scotland…
This statue is having a crappy day…
In the evening we converged again for dinner.
This guy is weeeeird!
Dinner was followed by dessert, because calories are meaningless on a bike tour!
Sometimes he voids his own warranty.
The bubblegum sundae. Pretty crazy.
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:
Seabirds flappin’ by the light of the moon.
We were in this hotel for a couple of days, so we could leave our gear on the floor for a change.
Chores In Edinburgh
July 2, 2023 Filed Under Uncategorized
This is about as dark as it ever gets at night here.
Time to wash some gear!
The machine did a pretty good job.
It takes a very, very long time to dry a sleeping bag.
Drying out tent and tarp.
Stuff drying everywhere…
Hungry cat will eat your pushpins!
After all the chores, I had the urge to sit quietly. Andrew and Nick were out exploring and I didn’t want to just hang around in the hotel alone, so I decided to bike to a nearby cinema and see the new Indiana Jones movie. Not bad! It was late on a Sunday and the movie had been out for a while, so I had the auditorium almost entirely to myself.
When I got out of the theater noticed a missed call from my nephew James, so I called him back and we chatted for about an hour. As we talked I rode the bike, turning randomly at intersections towards whatever seemed like the quieter part of town. Eventually I rolled to a stop outside a late-night bakery on Leith Walk.
The place had donuts filled with custard, as well as cheese and onion pasties, which I mispronounced as “pastries”. I bought one of each, then stood around on the sidewalk nibbling the chocolate off the top of the donut because I’m a “dessert forward” sort of eater, and in the meantime two people came up the sidewalk trailing an enormous shaggy dog on a long leash. One of them went to in to buy snacks, and only a few moments later the proprietor came out with a small steak pie and sat it on the ground in front of the dog, who leaned down and ate it in one bite, then licked the sidewalk for a while as the humans chatted.
As I stowed my remaining snack and got on the bike, I heard one of the dog owners explain to the proprietor that she was worried for her housemate, because he had smoked way too much pot, and then started rolling back and forth on the floor repeatedly insisting that he was “an egg.” Her tone implied true concern, and I couldn’t decide if that was actually more hilarious than the antics of the pot smoker.
It only took five minutes to zig-zag my way back to the rental, and I spent the time chatting again with James while chewing on a warm onion and cheese pasty. When I stood up from the bike a small pile of crumbs tumbled off the front of my jacket.
The rest of the crew was already inside and settling down for the night. The weather was warm enough for us to leave the window open, and for a while I watched the birds churn around in the sky. We were technically as far north here as the southern tip of Alaska, so it never got truly dark.
Castle and Cannons
July 3, 2023 Filed Under Curious
Nice thought, but, it’s a freakin’ cobblestone street. It’s never going to be friendly to cyclists.
DUNNAE DEW EET!
The restaurant has high opinions of itself.
The middle word is ‘god’ as Romans wrote it. So this is… God god god??
A bit of history for part of the Royal Mile. This is the John Knox house.
Yep… Arthur Conan Doyle, or ACD as we fans call him, was born here in Edinburgh.
Time to tour Edinburgh Castle! Here’s a handy map.
Yeah you’re reading that right. 2000 years.
As far as I know, there is no real evidence that the tribes up here traded with the Romans, though they were aware of each other.
That’s a lot of custom masonry…
Looking towards the war memorial building. Photographs were not allowed inside.
You can see the layers where parts of the building were re-worked. Presently it’s a chapel.
Stained glass in the chapel from the outside.
Must be a pretty boring duty, watching a stone lion.
Lots of paths to take here!
Stuff presented to various royalty at various times.
I wonder if that key unlocks anything at all. Probably just symbolic.
Are those pillows on that coat of arms? I think that’s awesome.
A window dedicated to folks from 500 years ago.
Barracks as they would have appeared long ago.
You’d need lots of padding to keep this stuff from bruising the heck out of you while it protects you.
Lady on a plinth? Typical. Chained up dogs and a peasant below? Kinda strange.
Spin the wheel … OF WEAPONS!
Plenty of torture happened in these walls.
Castle Stalker rendered onto a box, constructed from straw and resin by a prisoner.
Seriously. This thing was constructed from straw. It must have been painstaking work.
The earliest recorded prisoner in Castle Edinburgh is a Norse earl, locked up in 1197.
More treasures built from straw by prisoners.
Pretty detailed rigging in this model!
… And here’s the door itself, behind protective glass.
All kinds of fun stuff carved on this door.
It’s fake, but it’s still tasty.
A table of victualling!
Passing the time, long ago.
Love the design on the cards.
This place is kinda loopy.
Don’t get locked in!
Creepy dungeon lighting! Love it.
Looking towards the barracks.
Marchin’ over to the guns to make ’em go bang bang
My favorite part of this photo: The crowd reflected in the horn.
Always be pipin’
I never could figure out why the chin straps are worn this way…
Globe with Africa prominently labeled, but no lines to delineate countries. Probably some colonial thing.
Ready to fire some stuff!
Dinner With Friends
July 4, 2023 Filed Under Happy
ARE YOU AWAKE YET?
Cullen skink, thanks to Andrew!
This dude makes amazing fish.
Happy 4th! We celebrated with ice cream.
If we put in the second wheel, it would be over the weight limit…
Everything is finally packed up…
Departures and Arrivals
Me and these dudes had fun in Scotland!
Waiting patiently through the long check-in process.
See you later, bicycle. Good luck…
Guess who I found at the airport!
Rachel’s here!
After walking the luggage to the hotel, Rachel and I grabbed the key that Andrew left behind and went in search of snacks. (I find that the best first thing to do in any city is locate snacks.)
Andrew left a note to make sure they didn’t think we were checking out.
GLUTEN FREE
We spent the rest of the day walking around the city, admiring the layers of civilization. And there are many layers, in a place continuously occupied for as long as Edinburgh…
Adventures in plumbing.
Sometimes your exterior plumbing is just too old to work with…
I particularly enjoyed the stairs in Warriston’s Close:
Check out those cool bricks.
Longest stair in Edinburgh! (As far as I know.)
Along with layers of stone and steel, we also found layers of signage.
If this sign was in San Francisco instead of Edinburgh, everything on it would mean something quite different.
You can sell a lot of costumes and accessories in 100+ years.
I cycle, boi!!!! A sticker in Edinburgh promoting a cycling organization in southern Idaho. Dig it.
And layers of graffiti as well, each with their own weird cultural story to add.
Watch out you don’t get FU-MO
YÖRG BALLS, man. And why draw a heart when you can instead draw a less-than sign and a numeral three? Very post-modern!
The deep natural valleys around the castle have made the city grow as a series of galleries that look up, down, and across to each other. You can see more than you’d expect from any one place, but it’s always different.
This sign is cute as a … carabiner??
Dish goes up; dish goes down. Wall remains.
Cool lighting!
Don’t stare into the abyss too long.
Thistle do.
One of Rachel’s favorites was another stairway: The Scotsman Steps.
The Scotsman Steps. Pretty solid contender for second-longest stairs in Edinburgh.
All about the Scotsman Steps.
Relatively new construction (built a mere 125 years ago), and now a UNESCO-listed site.
We bought ice cream and kept wandering until our feet complained.
That old fishmarket is right around here… The sign says so…
A gallery of allergens.
You’re never lost. Robertson’s always nearby.
FREAKIN’ BAGPIPES GALORE. WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED??
Far too much to see in one day. Good thing we had the next one!