Scottish one-day free tour Nov 2016

We had some fun on a free tour this week, about 9 hours in total starting and ending in Edinburgh. The guide, named John, was great. Talked and talked. The "Free Tours" aren't really free, they're based on the idea that you pay what you want. The tour company is called "The Hairy Coo" and I do recommend them.

Our first stop was the Forth Bridge, which is actually very close to where we are staying in Cramond. I was all excited trying to take pictures of the reflection of it in the water, but I later realized I needn't have bothered, as they have it on the £20 note anyway. 

There are actually 3 bridges here, one from each the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.  That big red one is the oldest. Our guide says that the engineers had the instructions to build a bridge that wouldn't ever ever ever

ever ever

ever Ever 

fall down, because the previous bridge had fallen with a train on it and 30 people died. Of course, 30 people also died building this thing, the youngest one being a 13-year-old rivet catcher. There is a plaque to all the dead guys on the shore.

 It was a glorious fall day.

Other people from the tour got some coffee and hot chocolate and stuff. Coffee is something I often drink too much of while working, so I had this nice healthy stuff instead.  Full of vitamins and tasty too.

 

These are just there along the motorway. Gorgeous, aren't they? And yes they're as big as they look. Not a bad shot considering we were zipping along.

 

We then went to see this amazing tower that I photographed from a distance. It's a memorial built with public donations in Victorian times to William Wallace, on the hill that looks over at Stirling castle and where the Scots stopped to decide how 1500 of them were going to take the 10,000 English dudes hanging out there monopolizing control of the only road to the highlands.

 

This memorial is quite reminiscent of the one to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh, here, posing with the moon:

 This is the view from the top of that hill, looking at a Victorian spa town in the valley and snow on the mountains (yes, those are the Highlands).

Here's a similar view, a little to the left, with us in it.



And here's the view in panorama with Stirling Castle off to the left. It's much like Edinburgh castle, perched on an old volcano.

A really nice feature of this tour was that we got loads of little walks, and there was  a coffee joint at most stops.

I often take pictures of cool British coins. This one has a rose and a thistle on it. The money you get in Scotland is often different than England (or Wales or other places) which makes looking at the money fun. Took this photo before spending it on tea and hot chocolate to fortify us.

We then went to Monty Python's Holy Grail castle (apparently they used this same castle for three castles in the movie). Yarrow took a video of me and a nice American lady with fantastic (dyed) red hair doing the coconuts scene from the movie.  (hopefully, link to follow soon!)

And, as I have mentioned and showed on Facebook quite often, you often see real guys wearing their kilts in Scotland. Here's an old dude with a cane in his kilt. Thanks for making the castle look good, old dude.
Actually, this wasn't a "castle" according to our guide, because it wasn't a fortification. It was just a hunting lodge holiday home.

Here's our Hairy Coo bus. Isn't it lovely how they colour-coordinated it with the autumn leaves? I think that we lucked into the most glorious possible season to do this tour. The guide agreed.

 Here's a view of the lake where they invented curling. They want to hold the outdoor world curling championships there, but it hasn't frozen over since 1972! Apparently loads of people keep showing up every year, ready for the championships, then going to the pub instead when it, once again, isn't frozen.

Yon typical field-o-sheep. I notice most flocks seem to have ONE black or brown one (you can see it if you look closely -- maybe two in this flock). The guide said that was genetics. My hypothesis was superstition. :) The guide might be right though. Or maybe we both are.

And here is a haggis and mashed potatoe pie.

The butcher where we got this also had scrumptious bridie pies that look like this:



And then that butcher also had desserts and I had asked for one but he started making "jokes" about Trump and wouldn't stop making them so I left the dessert and walked out of the shop. Society needs to stop laughing about having a liar and an abuser in power. This is seriously evil. I wonder if people laughed during the rise of Hitler? Likely.

I was eating my pie sitting beside a new lovely Aussie friend named Ella, and yon butcher man came to window with another "joke" written on a paper. He was trying to be funny/friendly, but I looked away in disgust. Big white guys don't seem to understand the trauma of having a population of males who potentially would think it's fine to grab women whenever and wherever? Not at all funny, as I said. Then a few minutes later he came out and gave me the dessert I'd been thinking of getting, free of charge, and, better, apologized. I am not sure if he understands that there are reasons not to laugh about the tragedy of the rise of a hater, but maybe he does. It was a nice apology anyway.

Anyway, here's a view where the guide took us up to higher ground and told us about Norwegian larch and Norfolk pine and another tree that an 1800s committee decided were the best crops to reforest Scotland with (it had been deforested since the Roman times).

And I am more Canadian than I thought, because I ate all the snow I could while I was up there. I loved it. It didn't seem cold to me yet.

 And now is the part our guide was clearly waiting for all day: visiting his favourite hairy coos. He says they're attracted to his bus Daisy because she looks like a hairy coo, and they're attracted to his hairy coo hat, but I think they're also attracted to him, nice guy that he is (one of those big guys who just emanates bonhomie) and to the bags of bread he brings them!

 Everyone was trying to take a picture and we all got to feed them bread.

 And here's a shot of Glasgow's water supply reservoir.

 Another, taken by cool Aussie chick Ella (most other people on this tour were being lame-o and huddling in bus instead of glorying in mountain air and scenery! I have to say that I love Aussie chick solo travellers in general (our room-mate Erin now is also Aussie and she's fun too, encouraging me to do internet dating though I... haven't). Not sure I feel bored enough to go to all that bother but it would be nice to have a date. It's been like 15 months since I have had a date or a kiss goodnight. Sigh.
Travelling life, mom life...

Then we drove back to Edinburgh and decided to pay our guide definitely more than we'd originally thought we might because he was AWESOME and worth paying a lot. 

Now just because I'm here and I rarely am, here are some other shots of Edinburgh. Here are some of my favourite buildings. As a whole, Edinburgh is stark raving beautiful but as individual buildings I sure do love a half-timbered style, though this one is likely done in the 1800s with the rest of new town (my friend Bev tells me that was a Victorian thing).  

And these ones, which if I had to pick "the most beautiful buildings in Edinburgh" I would pick these. They're perched on the hill by the castle and I'm told they're private apartments. Back in the way back being next to the castle full of smelly soldiers was not a desirable thing, people wanted to be at the other end of the Royal Mile by Holyrood Palace. But if I had a chance to spend time in one of those buildings, I'd jump at it! I'd fly there directly.

And this glorious shot is what I can see most mornings out of the bedroom window in our AirBnB with our landlord Irvine in Cramond. Not at all shabby! Quite glorious in fact. My camera has failed to get all the colours right. This morning, there were pink and purple and blue and yellow stripes.