Edinburgh, Day 2

We slept in a bit, had breakfast at the hotel, then walked downtown, not with really any plans.

We hit up a Barclay's ATM first in a mall, then went to a park that had a really tall monument of some sort, just outside of the mall. The monument ended up being a monument to Sir Walter Scott (https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/venue/scott-monument). I purchased a pass to go up to the top level for both of us, because it looked pretty cool.

There was 287 steps to the top, and it was all tight circular stairs, as you went up, the way got skinnier and skinnier, to the the point where if you were fat, you wouldn't even be able to get up. In fact, Tracy told me later she was concerned that she was going to get stuck at the top, because some fat person was going to get stuck in the stairwell.

It gave great views of the city all around.

We then walked along a park, and around and up to to the Edinburgh Castle, and old castle in the middle of Edinburgh, built on an old volcano. It was quite impressive. A lot of it is is now museums inside, mainly about the military history of Scotland. We spent a number of hours up there.

It was cool and windy today, with bits of sunshine. It was especially windy up at the top of the monument and high on the castle.

We had tickets for the Scotch Whisky Experience at 4:20pm, so we headed to a pizza joint and shared a pizza, then headed to the scotch place. It's not an actual distillery (you'd have to travel to the countryside to get an actual scotch distillery tour), but they partner with over 400 distilleries in Scotland to provide a scotch tasting and learning experience. I'm not a scotch fan, but Tracy is, but we got the "gold" pass, which included 5 scotch samples from all around Scotland. We learned about the 5 different areas around Scotland that produce scotch, and the flavour's typical of each region. And the difference between single malt and blended. The tour ended with a viewing of the largest whisky collection in the world, which is housed at the Scotch Whisky Experience, over 3300 of never-opened bottles of whisky (https://www.scotchwhiskyexperience.co.uk/the-collection). Very impressive.

In the tasting room, a younger couple up from London joined us at our table, and we sat and talked for probably 1.5 hours with them, till they kicked us out at 7:15.

Tracy and I went to a restaurant called Pibroche for supper. It's a restaurant she saw when we arrived, and we tried to go there yesterday, but it was closed. They serve typical Scottish food, Tracy had vegetarian haggis, I had a meat pie. I'm digging the meat pies here in the UK.

We headed back to the hotel about 9:00pm.