Monday around Edinburgh

Up to breakfast by 8:30 at the Barony. Beautiful breakfast of poached eggs & bacon on toast and homemade brown bread.

Paul Johnson, the proprieter, says they are up at 5am to start baking & cooking. I think they have family in the area, Originally from Brisbain and decided on a whim to stay in Edinburgh, so Paul went back and closed up the house, put it up for sale and they purchased the B&B 2 years ago. They live in th servant's quarters in the basement with 3 small kids. Quite a nice B&B with 6 rooms. Has a glass skylight over the stairway. It is a 4-star B&B and they were getting an inspection later in the day from the tourist board to see if he is up to the 4-star standards. We left with a couple of pieces of white chocolate, raspberry pound cake for later in the day.

We walked down the street with our luggage to the Kingsley B&B, where we will be for the next two nights. Turns out if I had called the B&Bs directly, I would not have had to split the lodging between B&Bs...a lesson for us in the future. Find the lodging via booking.com, etc and then call the place direction for a discounted price without the booking agents cut.

We took the bus up and back to High Street for 3.20 Pounds Steriing each. Our B&Bs are very convenient with multiple busses working the street in front. Only have to wait about 5 minutes for a bus.

High Street is quite quaint, however, 5 of 6 shops sell Scottich woolens. Quite touristy. Our bus lets our out about half way on the Royal Mile. We walked up High Street to the Castle and then afterwards, we walked a bit down the High Street below the bus stop but it all looked about the same. So we decided at the end of the day to head back to the B&B and stop by the Old Bell, a traditional pub with 5 different cask pull beers. Peter and I tried two different Porters, both quite nice. The Pub, like others we have seen, is "dog friendly".

Dinner was at an Indian restaurant where we had an interesing conversataion with the waiter from Bangladesh who was studying in fashion design. He told us that he decided to go to school here due to the fact that back home the competiion for each university seat was 250/seat.Read more