there's nothing like you and I..

Ireland

Day 5

The next morning, we traveled to my favorite city of the trip: Edinburgh, UK. We first stumbled upon a little cemetery that we ended up spending at least an hour at. It was so serene. I had never realized how much I love cemeteries. There is so much history there and love and loss and.. I don't know, they are just really beautiful. I think the oldest gravestone we found was from the 18th century..

One of the first sights was Edinburgh Castle. Parts of it were built in 1093 (!), but was mostly noted for the conflicts it was involved in during the 14th through 18th centuries, as it is quite militaristic (cannons were shot while we were there!.. well fake ones clearly..) It was so cool. But, it was a tad expensive for the tour, plus we had our eyes on a different castle in the city to go visit, so we just scoured the area and went in just the very first part of Edinburgh Castle.

So we wandered some more and finally came upon the Holyrood Palace, official residence of the Queen Elizabeth II when she is in Scotland. The castle is open to the public year-round, except for one week at the beginning of the summer when the Queen is staying there.

We did not know this.

We could hear Scottish music (bagpipes and such) as we approached the castle, and when we entered the gates, we see this huge ceremony. And there is the Queen. The Queen of England. We saw. The Queen of England.

Unfortunately I didn't get grand pictures of her because people were always surrounding her. (I did crawl on the fortress barrier in order to try, but was yelled at by the guards. People rolled their eyes at the crazy American. All in a day's work.) But crazy, right? I mean, disappointing that we didn't get to tour the Palace, but I mean whatever. We saw the Queen. Of England.

Then we had dinner at another pub.. I had a delightful Irish coffee (Much better than Foldgers + Jack.. bleh.) I wrote down a cute quote on the wall that I plan on making a canvas of for my wall next year:

CARPE DIEM

Whilst we talk, time will have run

meanly on: therefore pluck the

fruits of today, heading not

the morrow. Horace 65-8 BC

Cute, yea? (Oh, and as for the photo, I snapped this one when I saw an old couple sneak off to an alley. And I'm in love with it. It is a perfect example of this adorable town.

So we went on our merry way. We had booked the b&b we had already stayed at in Stranraer because it was cute and we liked it and we had to be at the ferry early (like 9am I think..) So we started to make our way, but after quite a bit of traveling, we could see that we had quite a ways to go. So we stopped at a cute town with another lovely cemetery and another pub to get our much needed scotch fix. Turns out this pub was rather annoying because it housed a bunch of Americans for the duration of our drink (s). Ew.

So we're driving on crazy Scotish roads in the middle of the night and we very nearly run out of gas. It came down to not would we have to walk, but how far. Yikes. But we made it. I think they hide pockets of gas in their tanks Unlike in America. Sweet.