Castles in the Sand

(Edinburgh, Day 5 - August 26, 2007)

I'm going to post about the rest of our vacation before it's been a year even if it kills me... which it probably won't... hopefully... but anyway.

We started the day with the usual Scottish breakfast, greasy and delicious as always. We headed into town with the intent to explore some more. We spent most of the morning going in and out of shops around Princes Street.

Around noon we headed to the Scott Monument, paid the entry fee, and began the somewhat harrowing climb to the top. From the outside it's sort of difficult to tell but people can actually climb to the top of the monument. It gets very narrow so this leads to very narrow spiral staircases going up. Let me tell you, it was quite a memorable experience climbing this thing. Passing people on the stairs was exciting as well, as you had to sort of grab on to the ceiling of the staircase and push yourself against the wall so they could squeeze by. Nearest the top you couldn't even do this so you had to either retreat or hope the person coming down the stairs would get out of your way. I got some amazing shots of Edinburgh from the tower in the end, I think it was definitely worth it.

After this we headed back to Portobello and Eva bought a pail and shovel so we could go to the beach and make a Sand Castle! We attempted to make an accurate scale model of Edinburgh Castle... it didn't quite turn out that way but it did get a moat and an esplanade! Some people who viewed our sand castle photos thought it was someone else's castle... may they regret doubting our sand-castle building skills D:

After cleaning up and getting a bite to eat, we took a bus back into town with the intent of walking up to Arthur's Seat. The scenery in Holyrood Park is absolutely breathtaking, and we picked a perfect evening to head up. The sunset was probably one of the most dramatic I've ever photographed, I'm glad for more than one reason we went here. The other reason would be that I chose this incredibly romantic place and time to ask Eva to marry me... and she said yes! I mean... I think she was getting ready to ask me herself or something if I kept dragging my feet any longer. But in all seriousness I wanted the moment to be special, and I don't think I could have picked anything better than this one.

We ended up talking to this nice German girl who was really happy to be the first person to congratulate us on our engagement and she took a few photos of the happy couple.

After spending some time enjoying the sunset, we headed down in the mostly-dark with a dinky little LED flashlight. It's dangerous enough in the light navigating some of these paths, let's just say we had a fun if harrowing time making our way down.

When we got closer to the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel we heard the sound of drums echoing through the air. We had heard this earlier and thought it was a concert at the stadium in the distance, but it was in fact a group of musicians playing in the ruins. It was quite haunting and cool... though the effect was somewhat diminished when we rounded the corner of the ruins and interrupted some fellow answering nature's call... haha.

We made it back to Ardgarth in one piece and went to sleep knowing we'd have to be up before the crack of dawn to catch the shuttle into the airport to make our flight back to London.