Thursday, 20 July, 2017 – weather: all over the place

Today we are going to take hop on/off bus tours of Edinburgh. We decided to do that this day because the weather forecast looked the best of the remaining days. When we get up we are not so sure that we made the right weather decision. It has rained over night and then starts raining again. Then there was bright sunshine, then grey overcast, then slowly improving until the best weather was at sundown. Just like a typical Melbourne day. Trouble is this is the middle of summer!

Julie goes out to the place we went yesterday for her brekkie:

When she comes back we head out for our adventure:

We then go to the bus stop and discover there is a choice of three different routes.

We pick the first bus to arrive which is the Majestic Tour or the Blue line on the map. This is a tour which has pre-recorded descriptions which we listen to via head phones. It handles several different languages – was it just coincidence the 2 times I used it the language was defaulting to Chinese?

In any case, there are no photos taken from the busses as we are largely covering ground Julie walked around yesterday – see that Post for highlights. We did get to hear about lots of famous people from Edinburgh such as Adam Smith, James Clerk Maxwell, John Smith, Sean Connery, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, etc.

When we finish that tour, we wait to get on another which is the Edinburgh Tour – the Green line on the map. All in all with waiting and tours it was about 4 hours of elapsed time. We go back to the apartment and, given there is still time in the afternoon, after a bit of a refresh Julie goes prancing again while I work on the Blog. Here are some of her photos.

Julie had said that she would be back before 6:00 and she was – 5:59. There is some discussion about going out for dinner soon and also not going very far. We decide that we will go to the local pub at the top of our street.

The layout was impressive. The salad went to add to Julie’s salad; the chips were fine as were the onion rings; the tomato slice thick; and the burger itself not very nice, oh well.

Julie ordered an Irish Coffee.

The food service was very slow. As well, people came in looking for meals at 6:45 but were told forcibly that the kitchen was closed. All in all not the best experience on the trip but Julie did ok with her stuff. Back to the flat in a short walk and some more drinks and Julie does do some work.