Post-Edinburgh, I caught the Caldonian Sleeper back to London, cunningly using the sleeping time as traveling time, and saving a night of accommodation cost, because I’m clever.
Well, a little bit clever; I was still a bit exhausted from sleeping 8 hours in a reclining train seat, but I had an empty next to me, so I could sprawl a bit. Tried sleeping across both seats, and it worked OK the second time.
Next time I might try the actual sleeper compartment.

I stayed at the same Ibis I’d stayed at during LonCon in 2014, though I had a much better view this time.
And an early check-in, which was so very worth the £10 it cost.
Behold; The View!

There were even swimmers one day.

I took a walk to Canary Wharf one day, to try the mythical Thames Path, most of which seems to be a construction area.
On a rare bit of actual riverside path, I found this, marking roughly where the folks who founded the Jamestown Colony in Virginia departed.

On another, different trip, thanks to not sticking to the main road, I found a monument to the Great Fire of London.

That sounds wrong.

A monument commemorating the event?

There are Latin inscriptions on the sides, with English translations on plaques added later.
One side talks about what a jolly decent chap Charles II was during the rebuild.
The other side’s about the fire, and specifically mentions the line about “Popish Frenzy” which was added later, then removed later still; There’s a chunk of gouged-out stone where it used to be, so they weren’t concerned about covering up the fact that it had ever been there.

In a place named Hay’s Galleria, which looks to be an older u-shaped building they’ve glassed-in & filled with shops, I found a sculpture called “The Navigators“, which … Made me smile.

And then there’s this, at Royal Victoria Dock, near my hotel.

Yes, I did go for a ‘close’ pun.
I Regret Nothing!

Old Edinburgh has closes or wynds, narrow alleys running off the Royal Mile (and a few other roads) to provide access to the buildings behind the frontage, the roads behind those, and so on. Basically, a mechanism to increase the accessible surface of the building without sacrificing too much real estate.

Back in the day, when Edinburgh was a walled city & space was fantastically limited, there would be hundreds of people living on the things, in what could reasonably be described as shit-splattered squalor, given that drainage was managed by steep gradients and gravity. Did I mention that the Nor Loch, into which one side of the Royal Mile drained, had a crust on it?
(there was an execution where, after nailing her thumbs to her toes, the criminal was rolled down a close and into said Loch. Took 15 minutes to break through the crust & drown)

The closes are cleaner now, though often still steep, and they still seem to be a necessary part of how you navigate Edinburgh, or at least the old bits, on foot.
Also tricky to photograph, though I’m pretty damn happy with the Fleshmarket Close image.

As it kind of relates to the crowded nature of Old Edinburgh, here are a couple of pictures of where the town once ended.

The World’s End, aside from being a very fine name for a pub and a not-too-damn-bad movie, was just inside the walls of the city, thus, the end of the world.

Though about the only things that show that now are some metal cobblestones marking where the gates used to be.

The statue of Greyfriars Bobby is … popular for tourist photos.
Not sure how many people have a picture of the side of my head in their photos, as there’s really only one place to take a good picture from, and that’s the other side of the footpath. After a while I stopped waiting for people to get ready to take their pictures, because there’s an endless supply of them, so it never ends.

That said, at 0713h, while I was heading up to go on a bus tour, there was nobody present, so … I did the same damn thing as everyone else.

Even touched his nose for luck, or proof against rabies, or maybe fleas. Not sure which one; I’m good with all of those options.

I’d not known that Wojtek the Soldier Bear had ended up in Edinburgh, but that’s what happened.
There’s a statue and everything, with a happy-looking bear and a happy-looking soldier, which I ‘found’ on a scorchingly hot day. I’m assuming it was one of Scotland’s three allocated days of summer, and the park was filled with pale, pale people enjoying the bright stuff.
And a statue of a Bear, with shiny ears & nose from where people have rubbed them.

Speaking of Bears, here’s a very slightly relevant, but mostly just funny, sign.

And another one, from a cafe with really good food and a quite annoying proprietor.

I’ll be honest here, these were an attempt to make the building looming over the Meadows Walk look as spooky as possible.

This one looks a bit creepy, maybe, in an abandoned building sense;

Quite happy with this one; This looks spooky.

And a couple of pictures to end with.

This one’s not one of mine, and I’m not 100% sure where it’s from; Possibly the Scotland subreddit?
There was a storm one night, and someone got this picture of a lightning strike on Arthur’s Seat.
Or on something behind Arthur’s Seat; It’s hard to tell.

And here’s an attempt at ‘Full Moon Over The Meadows’.

Edinburgh has squirrels; I feel that it’s important that you know this.

This one was helpful enough to pose dynamically on a tree for maximum photogenicness & drama, and had a nice eye for appropriate backlighting. It’s really refreshing to see such dedication to the tourist experience.

Squirrel in Grass (pixel on memory chip, 2016)

They’re not exactly scared of people, though they are a little wary. There’s a safe distance, and they’ll be paying attention.
They’ll move if you’re too close for comfort, and they’ll watch you if they’re not sure what you’re up to.

The best approach, assuming you could see them at all, seemed to be to just stand there and wait while they got used to you. They’d not ignore you, but they would go back to an approximation of what they were doing.

It’s the spotting them that took some luck, because a squirrel in forage mode who’s not moving much is indistinguishable from a chunk of tree-bark, as demonstrated below.

First time I saw the adorable little buggers was in a park by the University, George Square.
Tamsin spotted them through the railings, and we saw them a number of times as we wandered by, up in trees or raiding rubbish bins, or just generally mooching about. Got within a metre of one once, as there was a sturdy iron fence in between us; It was using the stone footing of the fence as a path.

The pictures above were taken in The Meadows, just off the Meadows Walk, which was also a good spot for general people watching.

Here. for example, we have some folks playing cricket.
In kilts.
Because why not?

On a good day, and there were a number of them, the portable & disposable barbeques come out, and it looks like people are relaxing in a volcanic field.
Actually, given the ancient geological history of the place, that’s almost accurate.

And then there are the crows, attempting murder. And in this image, succeeding.

The Edinburgh Internation Festival & the Edindurgh Festival Fringe were in the warming-up stage while I was in Edinburgh, which meant that there was almost always a busker at the main crossroads in The Meadows during the day.
Once it was someone in casual-Goth attire playing what was probably a long-neck ukulele, and they were … bloody fantastic. Just sitting there, filling the area with music. We stopped to listen on a few occasions; Once I’m pretty sure they started with Pachelbel’s Canon in D, then started working around it until you could just hear it there, in the background.

I’m not sure that I ever saw the Meadows empty.
Even in the evening, which happened at 10pm or so when the sun finally went down, there’d still be people out there, doing their thing.

You’d see people setting up slack lines in the trees lining the walk, either to practice, and in some cases what looked like lessons were going on, in the less-formal ‘give it a go’ style.

This made me feel much more relaxed about trying to re-learn the Diablo.
Tamsin had taken me to Cascade Juggling, just to show me the place, and after thinking about it, I picked up a travel-friendly diabolo set. I left the purple monster I’ve had for years back in NZ, as it is not travel friendly – This one’s smaller & lighter, and the sticks are shorter & made from aluminium, so they weigh bugger-all.
Initial practicing is positive, though I do need to re-learn how long the sticks are, as I keep missing the catch when wrapping the strings around. Also, because it’s lighter, there’s less momentum available, so I have to pay more attention.

It flies high though.

Once the lights came on, and the crowds thinned out a lot, you’d get sights like this one, which was quite nice when walking back from wherever the hell I’d ended up that day.

I’ll close out with an odd thing I wasn’t fast enough to photograph.
In the evening, having reached the end of the Meadows Walk on my way back to The Argyle, I’d stopped at the lights, because a fire engine was on the way.
It got to the lights, slowed, and then pulled into the walk, driving down between the trees, lights still flashing, and drove into the park & out of sight.

There was probably a fire in one of the big-ass bins for the disposal of BBQ coals & dog waste, because that’s a combination of smells we all need, but I like to imagine they were heading for the Starbucks up the way, or maybe had decided to do spot of BBQ for dinner, and wanted to keep the engine close in case of a callout.

I was getting steadily better, the cough having … well, ‘vanished’ is the wrong word.
‘Diminished’ doesn’t really cut it either.
Let’s say that the bouts of horrifying coughing which left my sides hurting and did odd things to my voice were less frequent?

Anyway, we caught a bus out to Cramond Island, or more accurately to a bus stop near there, then walked the rest.

It’s an odd place.
There’s little indication as to why prehistoric folks found the need to construct a line of standing stones out to the island.
I mean, you could use it as a procession guide, I suppose, and it came in handy when people in more modern times wanted to build a walkway, because they had this line of bloody great stones letting them know where the shortest and shallowest path was.

They’ve lasted well; Apparently the encrustations of marine life have helped there, though I’d not be surprised to find that those notches, whatever the hell they’re for, have been tidied up from time to time.

Probably the oddest thing is the trick of perspective with the very occasional ‘gate’ in the line of stones; A simple side-step by the person taking the picture, and someone standing in the gate vanishes.
It’s honestly pretty creepy from the viewer’s point of view; As the viewed, no big deal.

And that thing is dead straight.
That’s tricky enough to do on land, but in an area that floods every 12 hours or so? With simple hand tools?

Of course, in later years someone built a more modern structure on it, and there are some indications that the Romans used it; That said, the building in the picture I took looked like it’d fall down if you gave it a hard look, unlike the line of stones.

I’m counting a thing that happened the night before as happening on π Approximation Day, because of time zones.
Or something.

Tamsin had asked about how the Gen Con events registration system worked, so we had a play with it, using the keyword “Pirate”, because why not?
This came up;

It would have been morally wrong not to get a ticket, and of the three sessions, one was in a gap in my schedule.
So we filled that gap.

The GM’s name was familiar, and after some checking, it turned out to be the Mikey Mason I’d heard of; Geek Rock Comedian, Gamer, and I think the first person to welcome me to the Fear The Boot Forums when I signed up & made an introductory post.
I should point out that not all of his stuff is Geek or Gamer related, nor is all of it intended to be funny.

From what I can tell from his website posts about his games, we must have found the game soon after it went up on the Gen Con site. Certainly my one ticket was taken into account when he mentioned seats available, so I must have only just bought it, based on post timings and some frankly suspect conversions between time zones.

Breakfast, as is appropriate for π Approximation Day, was pancakes.
With chocolate and bananana.
From a Himalayan cafe.
Because it’s Edinburgh.

I’d had a filthy cough the previous few days, to the extent that planning seemed sort of pointless, and on the day the prospect of renting a car to go and see castles didn’t really appeal; I was uncertain as to how my stamina would last.
Thus, we went to the Scottish Parliament, to see those bits they’ll let you wander around.

There are the outlines of people worked into the debating chamber, to remind the MSPs that they are being watched, and that they’re here to do a job. I rather like the sentiment.
There’s also the poem “Open The Doors“, by Edwin Morgan, written for the opening of said Parliament, which is worth a read.
You can buy postcards with bits of it, or the whole thing, in the wee shop, because of course there’s a Gift Shop.

Next we went to the Scottish Storytelling Centre, which includes the Knox House, which is a preserved chunk of mostly-1500’s Edinburgh, preserved because of a fairly fleeting historical association with John Knox.

To finish up, we toured the Writer’s Museum, with floors dedicated to Burns, Scott, & Stevenson.

I’ll be honest, I’m not certain that I’ve real all of anything by Stevenson, but I’m damn sure I’ve read nothing by Burns or Scott. Unless that Haggis thing counts?

Then, on the way back, we saw this.

Ahhh, students, …

It was a great day.
Can’t really say much more than that.

The bus left Edinburgh at 8-ish.
I get the idea that they’d have liked to have left earlier, but some people had been told to go to the wrong place for pick-up, which complicated things.

There were also a couple who had misread the date on the ticket, but they managed to fit them on anyway.

This image, I think, illustrates why I didn’t take many pictures from the window of the bus, despite having a window seat.
And also why I didn’t need sunblock.
I was hoping it’d be doing this while the Loch Ness part of the trip, for maximum spooky, but that didn’t happen.

First stop of actual significance, because a roadside cafe with a gift shop doesn’t qualify, was Glencoe, site of some of the worst manners shown by a guest in recorded history.

Nowadays it’s the site of some skilled, daring, and at times ambitious tour bus parking.
Also a piper, who might be in that scrum behind me.
This probably counts as a ‘photographing photographers’ selfie, if I’m keeping track; Not sure if that’s better or worse than the non-selfie version, to be honest.

There were a lot of tour buses, plus regular tourists in regular vehicles.
As such, taking a photo without a bus or selfie stick in it took some doing.

Early attempt.
Looks like I’m trying to product-place the tour company, but I’m pretty happy with how the landscape came out.
(this is, incidentally, the bus I was on, or at least part of it)

Foreboding clouds, impressive hills.
Still kind of looks like a car ad.

OK, so I just zoomed in on the phone before taking this one.
I like the clouds though.

A sea of clouds, above a sea of tourists.
I mean, I could crop it, but I find the cluster of people, cameras, cars, and cameras on sticks to be sort of funny.

The tour guide, I should mention, did talk about why we were stopping here, why it was important, and so on.
I’d love to claim that it felt sort of dark and foreboding, but … that’s just the landscape and the weather.
Sorry.

Looks a lot like chunks of the South Island though, doesn’t it?

Possibly the best themed WiFi symbol ever, with added Man-In-Kilt in the background. 

Next was Loch Ness.
More accurately, due to a slightly delayed start and some time spent stuck behind a truck or two, next up was an accelerator & brake mad dash, along very winding roads carved into hills, in a very large bus, to make the Loch Ness Ferry sailing.
It was a lurchy experience.

Some folk were dropped off at Urquart Castle, to explore the ruins & be collected later, while the rest of us went on ahead to catch the ferry which went back up the loch to said castle.
I’d opted for the boat ride option when the weather was frankly a bit shitter, back at Glencoe.

There was a substantial covered & enclosed area on the boat, with obligatory coffee vending setup.
It was also very loud; Engines + Tourist Commentary + Multiple Small Children Who Were, Frankly, Over This.
I ran away to the upper deck, where there was rain of a sparse but stingingly cold nature, and much fewer sources of noise.
Also people who were a bit more interested in seeing the Loch itself.

I should note that I do not put much faith in the argument that an insurance company wouldn’t have covered a bunch of triathletes competing in Loch Ness for a million pounds against ‘monster attacks’ unless they believed there was something there. Rather, I think they could barely keep the grins from their faces as they took the premiums, and were maybe wondering about offering Sasquatch coverage too.

Eventually, we made it to the castle, or the remains thereof, and picked up the folks we’d dropped off.
(It’d have been much more atmospheric if the mist & cloud had hung around at low level, but such is life)

Yes, I took a lot of pictures of a castle, and yes, I’ve subjected you to most of them.
Trust me, I deleted the really crap ones.

I didn’t notice it at the time, but I’m finding it interesting that in some of the pictures it’s obvious that this is a ruin, and in others, really not.

And that’s it for the photos.

There was a lot of time spent on a bus, passing through scenery of a spectacular, or at least pretty nature, but cellphones don’t do well at landscapes, particularly from a moving vehicle. Thus, no pictures.
The Highlands are well worth a visit though.

In that it is actually colder, thus more chill, and this allowed me to relax more.

I left myself with plenty of time to get to the train station (King’s Cross), so I had time to kill, which I spent sitting at a table on a balcony level, watching the huge train schedule board update & the 1300h Edinburgh creep steadily closer.
(The most immediate departure is on the left-most board, so they slowly work their way right-to-left)
Password-Not-Required WiFi from one of the food places helped while away the time, by which I guess I mean “give me access to the final episode of Season 6 of Game Of Thrones”, though I did make a tactical blue by zipping away the straps on Big Red before getting to the platform.
The train, you see, was a billion carriages long, and I was at the one at the far end.

Train wasn’t crowded, and I got a window seat, so that I could do my usual trick of falling asleep, but with a nice view!
Briefly considered taking the trip down-train to get a coffee, but as it was 8 carriages away, I decided that I didn’t need one that badly.

Getting to the hostel in Edinburgh wasn’t without complication; The GPS Navigation Thing on my phone, which I’d decided to test out, was getting confused by tall buildings and the fact that Edinburgh Waverly Station is several stories below old Edinburgh, so it was having a tough time figuring out a route, and kept directing me up & down the same road.
I just went with climbing a lot of steps (The Scotsman Steps, in fact) while ignoring the GPS until it started giving me directions which weren’t flatly contradicted by observable reality, then followed those.
GPS, and assisted navigation technologies in general, are tools for navigation, not replacements for it. Can’t stress that one enough.

My first three nights were in a 4-bed dorm. Once again, I got a top bunk, which is no big deal.
Room-mates this time included a German chap who I don’t think I ever talked to, who had carefully arranged his stuff at night to create, unintentionally I’m thinking, a barrier for me to get to the ladder to my bunk, someone in the other top bunk who left absolutely no impression on me at all, and … D.

D. was an older lady, who started off the afternoon seeming OK, came across as a bit … off … by early evening, and was bitterly ranting and smelling of booze by nightfall. Frankly, I was glad of the window being open, because the booze-fumes were strong with this one.
Fortunately there was no vomiting, bed-wetting, or other obnoxious hostel-drunk behaviour, and the bitter ranting was confined to that one incident. Or my demeanor of  “Frankly, I don’t give a crap” paid off?
She eventually left, to go teach somewhere else in the UK, but not before she upset another resident by eavesdropping on a phone call and going into a racist/nationalistic bigotry diatribe about the subject in question; One of the staff told her where to put her opinions.

The hostel itself, which I’m not naming because of reasons, is architecturally … interesting.
It’s two terraced housed knocked together into one space by putting doors through on the Ground & First floor landings, and because the floor plans are mirror images, there are two spiraling staircases on either side of a wall, one counter-clockwise & one clockwise. Also, there are two kitchens, so you can pick which one suits your mood better.
Reminds me a little of Tamson House, from Charles de Lint’s Moonheart & Spiritwalk.

And, Edinburgh.
Well, there’s a castle, which we visited, as you do, and learned various historical things from tour guides.
There was a chap who was in character as the Earl of Moray, talking about the re-capture of the castle from the English, and demonstrating on a willing volunteer the armour & weapons of the day.

It took me a little while to work out that he was in character, and not some miscellaneous title-holder who happened to be interested in re-enactment; The references to being captured by the English sort of gave it away.

On the way back from the Castle we stopped in at a bar Gulo T. used to work at, mostly because it was open, to see how it was going. Ended up staying a while, for a very nice evening of sitting at the bar, chatting to the barman & the other patrons, and watching him curse at the register for not having the actual stock listed, and for being vastly too expensive when it did.
They’d only recently re-opened, and there were issues, like a couple of the keg lines which were just producing foam, and a coffee machine he had no clue how to work.
(I was tempted to offer to take a look, based on having played with the one at AECOM, but wasn’t quite sure how to make the offer)
In any case, probably one of the best pub evenings I’ve had; Gives me an idea of what having a local must be like.

Getting to & from Edinburgh’s centre involves going through the Meadows, and there’s often something entertaining happening, such as people playing cricket while wearing kilts, presumably because they can.
There have also been people practicing slack-line walking, and recently some very committed Mormons, given how long they’re out there.

Other Things, …

We climbed Arthur’s Seat, which has some spectacular views of Edinburgh, and where I took no photographs because it started lightly raining and the rocks get really slippery.
We also climbed, some days later, Salisbury Crags, where the weather was less trying-to-kill-you, and where I took these.

They’re setting up for the festival, or more accurately for many festivals, so there’s an enormous cantilevered seating structure outside Edinburgh Castle.

Over the course of the week-and-a-bit I’ve been here, I’ve noticed a lot of general-purpose Scottishness going on.
There are people wearing kilts & the like who are obviously dressed up for an important event of some sort, stores selling miscellaneous Tartan things, and the odd Piper in public places where tourists might spot them and comment favorably.

There are also people just wearing the things because, apparently, they want to, and bands who’ve included a piper … Well, it’s distinctive as all hell.

I’m not sure where the haggis-flavoured crisps come in.

Went to a Tai Chi class, which was a lot of fun, and a new thing for me.
Granted, I had no clue what was happening during the run-through of the form at the start, and only noticed the bit of said form that had been taught at the class once it was already gone, having been too focused on trying to face the right way, not collide with either of the other students, and at least be standing on the correct leg with my limbs in roughly the right directions.
The process of learning one move, and one move only, on the other hand, was rather relaxing & quite fun, as it turns out.