Scotland2005: One last day in Edinburgh

Well after a couple of busy days visting with new friends and seeing the sights and just enjoying the city, we took it kind of easy today and embedded ourselves as locals by going to the neighborhood laundromat! Nothing like a laundromat to bear witness to the daily life of the everyday person. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on perspective, there is no close laundromat to our hotel -- we had to go out into Old Town on a double-decker bus quite a ways to find one -- more or less across the street from the University of Edinburgh.

Now in Scottish laundromats one doesn't find the same sort of machines one does in the US. These all are coin operated from a large pannel at the rear of the store, next to a soap dispenser (.20p per cup). You put your clothes into a machine, put the soap in, then insert coins and "dial" up the proper machine and away it goes. Then you do what everyone else does in a laundromat -- sit and watch the wash, maybe read a trashy Scottish gossip rag, or in our case, run next door to a pastry shop for breakfast, then back to the laundromat to eat. People in laundromats at 9am are not very conversational, and tend to sit and watch their undies spin, so we didn't strike up a conversation with anyone. Most folks just dropped a load off with the attendant for pick up later. Forutunately we found a nice Internet cafe next door, where Tony was able to upload all the pictures.

I decided to take the bus a bit further to the Edinburgh Harley-Davidson dealer. It was about a 10 minute bus ride and a nice walk through a lovely neighborhood from the laundromat. I had a chance to visit with the staff, pick out a couple of Edinburgh-HD t-shirts for the collection, and then head back to the Laundromat where Tony had just finished up.

It was just after noon, and we took some time to run to the train station and book our hotel in Glasgow for the next three nights. The rail stations in Europe all have hotel booking offices inside, and the one at Edinburgh was staffed by a nice young lady from New Zeland who was traveling and working on a temporary worker visa for year -- and I was quite envious. She'd just been posted there for a few days and wasn't familiar with the places in Glasgow, but she did manage to find us a four star hotel, next door to the train station for £90 per night ($150), including breakfast -- so we jumped on it. When she called her supervisor for some help with the transaction the super said that she couldn't believe the rate for such a nice hotel, and we'd be very happy with that, so we are looking forward to heading over there tomorrow morning.

After that we picked up some Pasty's (meat-filled pies) and a couple of Diet Cokes and took a train out to the small town of Linlithgow which is about 20 minutes west of Edinburgh. Linlithgow is where the Stuart kings had their main palace and residence from the 1400s to the early 1600s and where Mary, Queen of Scots was born. After King James VI also became James I of England and left for London, became pretty much unused until Cromwell's troops camped there and when they left they torched the place. Fortunately all the walls still stand, and you can see it was once magnificent. These preserved ruins are great fun for Tony and me, exploring and using our imagination to spot details and filling in how it might have worked or looked.
We'd explored Linlithgow palace before last visit, but wanted to stop by again since they'd restored a spectacular fountain in the courtyard that wasn't there when we were here in 2003. We ate our lunch at the top of one of the towers in a lovely little room overlooking the Loch.



Apparently Linlithgow was not magnificent enough for other tourists, for as we were leaving, a couple from England were there and she poked her nose in and seeing that it was ruinous and not furnished or roofed asked the Steward in an indignant one, "you mean it isn't furnished? why would anyone want to visit?" We resisted the opportuity to tell her why.



There was one more castle in the vicinity but the bus system couldn't get us there so we decided to take a taxi about 4 miles to Blackness Castle on the shores of the Fourth. This was a massive stone place that was used more as a prison than a residence, and later, up until WW1 it was used as a garrison and an armory, so it is still in very good condition. The Steward was kind enough to drive us back to the Linlithgow train station and we talked a bit of history and ancestry with him -- turns out he has a brother who lives in Tampa where Tony is from, making this an even smaller world.

So now we are heading out for dinner -- the vegiterian clerk is not working the counter at the Internet Cafe tonight so I suspect we'll ask some local advice again. The hotel bar has live music tonite too -- the same singer we heard two years ago that we enjoyed very much, so we'll pop in there before heading to bed. We'll write from Glasgow tomorrow..

One last time from Edinburgh --

Gary and Tony