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On Thursday February 12th My roommates Jess and Danielle, my friend Lyndsey, and I all left the lovely town of Hull for Edinburgh, Scotland! Our choice of transportation was train. We managed to find a really good deal for the way there and only paid about 20 pounds for our tickets. Unfortunately this meant a lot of starting and stopping. Our first few stops were fairly uneventful but our last stop was awful. We had a 4 hour layover type of thing in the middle of the night in an un-heated train station. It was not the worst 4 hours of my life but definitely some of the longest. I couldn't sleep because of the old guy on the other side of the room snoring as loud as possible and the person who kept randomly singing along to his iPod. Finally we only had about 45 minutes until our train was supposed to arrive. One of the workers came into the waiting room and was nice enough to tell us that one of the coffee places was now open if anyone wanted anything. Me being the coffee lover that I am jumped on the chance, especially since I was freezing cold. The other three elected to stay behind. As I was walking towards one of the generic coffee places that all train stations seem to have (I can say that now because I am a seasoned train traveler ) I noticed the glowing green sign of Starbucks. Cue Allelujah chorus. I hadn't had any Starbucks since my arrival in the UK and there it was calling my name! Starbucks has never let me down and now they were there again offering the most delicious skinny caramel macchiato anyone has ever tasted. With that in hand I walked back to my friends to see them leaving the waiting room with my bag in tow. They had been told that we could go sit on another waiting train (where it was warm) until ours arrived. We did that and we were finally on the last leg of our tour. Danielle was really the only one that stayed awake for the last leg so she told us about all the great scenery we could've seen on our way in.
Since we had traveled by night it was Friday when we arrived in Scotland. We got off our train, found a map and made our way to the Castle Rock Hostel. We couldn't get in to our rooms yet but it gave us the opportunity to rest up a bit before we went to Edinburgh Castle. Our Hostel was called Castle Rock because it was literally right below the giant rock that Edinburgh Castle sits on....it took us about 2 minutes to walk there. The tickets we bought included a tour of the castle but I enjoyed wandering around on my own better. My favorite part was St. Margaret's chaple. It's the oldest building at the castle and its very simple and plain on the outside but has really pretty stained glass windows and decorated really nicely inside. It can only fit 25 people inside at a time and some people even have weddings there. We also saw the crown jewels which was very cool but we couldn't take pictures :(
After we were done with the Castle we went back to the Hostel and got ready to go out for dinner. We had been living on granola bars all day so we were really looking forward to an authentic Scottish dinner. We went to Biddy Mulligans Irish Pub...in Scotland. They had a good deal for people with hostel cards! Either way it was still delicious and we even splurged for dessert. It was 2 for 1 so Jess and I chose two meals we both wanted to try and then split them. She got a breakfast and I got Chicken and Leeks. The dessert was probably the highlight though. Sticky toffee pudding is amazing and I wish I could eat it every day. After dinner we went back to the Hostel and crashed at around 9.
The next day we had our bus tour of the Highlands and Loch Ness. Scotland is really beautiful and it was nice to get a chance to see all of it. The Highlands were stunning. It was really foggy the day we went so everything looked really eery and mysterious. You weren't really sure what was going to pop out of the mountains. Loch Ness was equally amazing. We didn't go exactly where we were supposed to and ended walking on a path pretty much in someone's backyard to get to the Loch. After Loch Ness the tour was pretty much over so the bus headed back to Edinburgh. The driver had to drop us off early because he was going to run out of gas but that was okay because we got to see a bit of Edinburgh night life. There was a Valentine's day party at our hostel that night so we went to that for a little while and made it to 10 when we finally went to bed.
The next morning was our last day in Scotland. Our train left at 1130 so we had just enough time to go have breakfast at the Elephant House. The Elephant House is the birth place of Harry Potter. This is where JK Rowling was inspired to write about the boy wizard who captured the hearts of children and adults all around the world! They also have excellent coffee and croissants.
That ends our adventure to Scotland. The train ride home was uneventful and we were all glad to be back in Hull but wishing we could've stayed longer.
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