Still Playing Catch Up on the Blog

So, here we sit in an internet cafe with wi-fi by the hour...no luck with wi-fi in our hostels since we left Dublin. We are in Madrid right now, and it is June 8 - Day 11...Here is the latest I can offer to bring you up to speed:

Thursday, May 31 – Day 3 (York to Edinburgh)

We woke early this morning to join all of the other B&B guests for a “traditional English breakfast.” Spiros and Elizabeth cooked up quite a feast. After breakfast, we headed out on the town. First, we took a stroll through The Shambles, an atmospheric old butchers’ quarter with colorful tipsy medieval buildings and original meat hooks sticking out from under the eaves. Here you see Rich in “a shambles”… Next, we visited York’s Castle Museum where they have created replicas of century-old streets and everyday objects from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. After the Castle Museum, we went to the York Minster. This beautiful Gothic cathedral sits on top of the remains of a Romanesque church dating back to 1100 and a Roman fort dating back even further. Constantine was proclaimed emperor here in A.D. 306! We took a tour of the undercroft which (thanks to the work of excavators and archeologists) displays the foundations of these three separate and distinct buildings. We also climbed the 275-step tower for an incredible panoramic view of the city. Here is one view from the top…

We took the 3:00pm train to Edinburgh, arriving in the middle of a torrential rain shower. Since it was pouring down rain outside, we decided to take care of some business in the train station – good thing too! We knew we needed to take a ferry from Scotland to Ireland, but we were not sure of the times, locations, connections, etc. After waiting in the cue, we were told that we had to catch a 1:30 train out of Edinburgh in order to make all of our connections and arrive in Belfast by 9:30pm the next night. This meant we were not going to have a lot of time to spend in Edinburgh, we were going to need to spend the night in Belfast (something we had not really intended), and we were going to need a place to stay in Belfast BEFORE we got there.

Armed with new information and with no signs of the rain letting up, we ventured out into Edinburgh to find a place to rest our heads for that night. After traipsing through the rain for about 30 minutes, we found a hostel downtown along the “Royal Mile.” Both of our guidebooks mentioned this hostel as a good place to stay…unfortunately, though it was one of those places that must have gone DOWN HILL since the books were published.

Once we dropped our bags off in the room, we took a walk up the Royal Mile almost to the esplanade of the Edinburgh Castle. The Royal Mile is a historic road lined with museums, pubs, and shops, stretching from the castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse (the Queen’s home away from home). We stopped in a pub for dinner and a beer before hitting the sack.