Day 5 afternoon in Edinburgh

We love Edinburgh. The streets are so wide, it feels really spacious. Even the busy bits don't feel overwhelmingly busy, though I know we wouldn't be saying that if we'd been here a week ago. It doesn't feel as dirty as other cities either. The buildings are amazing, they just go on up, and not ones made of steel and glass, these are really old houses and other buildings built before there were cranes! They are so higgledy piggledy and beautiful.

We walked in to the city from the air BnB for about half an hour along a quiet pedestrian path away from the roads, through King George's park where we stopped for a picnic lunch.

We walked up to the castle and got as close as we could without paying, used their toilets and then headed back down the hill. Without seeing the inside of the castle, the most impressive thing was the temporary structure built for the Military Tattoo for the festival that they were just starting to take down. Eleanor had told us about it, but once we saw it we genuinely didn't believe that it could possibly be temporary until we asked one of the visitor guides! It's amazing - it takes them 6 weeks to put it up and take it down for a month of usage during the festival.

We then walked down the royal mile, and out to the Scottish parliament, and Holyrood palace before climbing Arthur's seat. It was pretty hot, and a really tough climb. I'm reasonably fit, but I was knackered by the time we got to the top! And there were so many people up there: small children, people wearing completely inappropriate footwear, much older people than us... I can't believe they all made it up there! We did walk pretty quickly, but still!

On returning to the city we found a cake shop to replenish our energy reserves, then a pub to replenish our cider reserves. We walked round the city a bit longer until it was a reasonable time to get dinner, and found a fab place to eat.Read more