Hilary's Adventure: Last day in Edinburgh

Today is our last day in Edinburgh. We will be leaving on a night sleeper train back to London. We will be sad to see Edinburgh go, we quite liked the place and the people.

On our last day we got up and had some breakfast before checking out. We needed to store our luggage with the hostel before our train ride to London. Normally places will either take the bags and put them in a back room or you leave them in a unused room and hope nothing happens to them. This place had a good set up. They had a room locked off, under security and filled with lockers that were big enough to take most bags. The only down side is that it was a £1 every time you wanted to access your bag. It wasn’t a big deals because we organised ourselves so that we didn’t need to get to our bags till we were leaving for the train.

After checking out we headed for the castle. This time we had bought our tickets online so we didn’t need to stand in long ques in the rain for tickets. As we entered the que wasn’t as bad as yesterday because to weather was wet and windy today, I’m still glad we didn’t have to stand in it. We collected our tickets and headed inside the 2^nd wall of the castle to start the free tour that was about to start. The tour was interesting; the guide took us round and pointed out the history of the different building and the history of who lived there and what they did. The tour lasted about 30min before we went exploring ourselves. We looked inside Queen Mary of Scots rooms that she had in the castle when she fled from her husband. There were the prison cells for the soldiers and Prisoners of War from different battles. There were the Scottish crown jewels and a memorial for all the Scottish soldiers who died in battle since WWI. The whole place was really interesting.

Once we had enough of the castle we headed off to do some Scottish whisky tasting. I didn’t really want to do this but Kyle did so off we went. We happened to be in luck because the whisky tasting place was having a distiller fair that only happens once a year for 2 days and we happened to get the last day. Because the fair was on it was included in the price of the ticket so we got to taste more whiskey then we normally would have on this tour. The que for the tickets was long but that was alright because in was inside out of the rain and wind.

The first part of the tour is a roller coaster ride. It wasn’t like you find at Luna Park it was more gentle and informative. You first jump in a barrel that will be your seat for the ride. The ride starts off with a projection of an old man talking to you about whiskey, it then moves on to go through the process of how they make whiskey. It lasts about 10min before you jump off the other side and head towards the tasting room. In the tasting room everyone was given a glass and a piece of paper that had a coloured circle divided up into 4 sections. When everyone was seated a lady began her talk about the different region that whisky is made in and the different flavours that the regions tend to make. As she was going through the different regions we had to smell the different sections of the paper in front of us. It was a scratch and sniff card and quite accurate in their smell they were representing. Once she had run through all the different areas we then had to put our glass on a different colour section that we would like to try the whiskey of. I put mine on the fruity area of the low lands and Kyle put his on the Smokey area of the islands. I really didn’t like the taste. It is all way to strong and intense for my likening. Kyle really liked his so that was good. After the tasting we headed down stairs to the world’s largest collection of whiskey. It was impressive the amount and different sorts there were. Some were really obscure and were given to him by the distillers others were different types from the one maker. Next we headed to the other room that held the novelty whiskey bottles. There were some shaped like golf bags and clubs and others shaped like women. The most interesting one was a full chess set were every piece contained whiskey. The idea was that when you play and you took out the opposition piece they had to drink the piece. It would make for an interesting game.

After the tasting and the bottle collection we headed off to the distillers fair to try some more. As part of the entry fee we both got 4 tokens that could be swapped to try some whiskey from different people. I gave my tokens to Kyle because there was no way I was going use them all, so he had 8 token to play with. Before we got to the tasting there was one of the distillers having a talk about his whiskey and how he makes them. His talk was interesting but he wasn’t use to talking in front of a crowd. He talked for about 20min answering our questions we had.

Once the talk we over we headed off to the fair to try some more. We lasted about an hour wondering from vendor to vendor talking to them about their whiskeys. There were only 6 vendors but all but 1 had different types to try. Some I found interesting because of their bottles but not one I would have liked to drink a whole glass of. Kyle was having fun trying different ones. Towards the end people were trying to give away their tokens because they had had enough. After Kyle had his fill we went looking for lunch. We ended up in a pub down on the grass market that we had been trying to get into for the last 3 days. Somewhere on the internet we had read they did good food so that’s why we wanted to try. We were not disappointed. The food was good and a good size, it was classic pub food done well. After dinner we wondered back to the hostel to kill time till our train. In the chill out room they were playing Narnia so we sat and watched that. We also managed to fit in a QI XL episode before leaving for the train.

The train ride was uninteresting. We didn’t pay for beds because they were going to charge us near £40 extra each for a bed. The seats were comfortable; it was like being on a plane but with slightly more room. I slept most of the way and Kyle didn’t so when we exited the train at 6am at Euston I was alright and a bit awake and Kyle was sleepy. I don’t think I would choose to do an overnight train ride again in a seat without having a home to go to after to sleep off the ride.