Edinburgh,Scotland

On the weekend I went to Edinburgh, Scotland. We were supposed to go and visit the Lake District but the weather was constant rain. We left the house at 8:00 am and drove north for 2 and a half hours. When we got there we went to Holyrood castle. This is a castle in Scotland that is still used by the queen goes to visit Scotland. We took an audio tour of most of the castle, it was very interesting. The rooms were huge!! We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside of the castle so I only have them from outside. After that it was lunch so we went back to the car and ate. We then had extra time between lunch and our visit to the Scottish parliament so we went to Our Dynamic Earth. It is a scientific museum thing. You start the tour by getting on a “time machine”(elevator). The “time machine” took us back to the beginning of time; we saw a short movie clip about the Big Bang. You get to see how the whole solar system and stars were formed. Then you move on and they showed us a movie about how the earth was crated by volcanos. The room was filled with fake smoke and the floor shook under us when they made a fake earth quake. It was very cool.  Then we moved into a blue room were the showed a video about the ice age and when the whole earth was covered in ice. That was the end of the time traveling and we came out into a room will dinosaurs and fossils and stuff like that. We played a few of the games they had like this one about if dinosaurs had survived. It showed how the dinosaurs would have to change and adapted the different climates. It was quite funny to see what the computer said they would look like. Then we moved on to the oceans. They had many pictures of it. After the oceans we moved into the polar extremes. It talked about polar bears, penguins and the extreme cold weather in the artic and Antarctic. The room was quite cold and they had a huge ice chunk in the middle of the room. It was very cold to touch so Fraser and me came up with the brilliant idea of seeing who could hold their hand on the ice the longest. We are both very stubborn and neither of us would take our hand off.  At first it was terrible but after a little bit our hands went numb and it was fine until we got to the point were the ice felt hot. Just before this happened the rest of the family got bored and left to the next room. My hand felt like everything inside was being squeezed a lot. Our hand then started to turn white and red.  It hurt so much but neither of us gave up.  At this point there are hand prints on the ice from where I hand melted the ice a bit. Then we would move our wrist and elbow down and our hands would twitch like crazy. A little but after that a guy came in telling us that the adventure flight was leaving soon but the next one was not leaving for 10 minutes so we decided that we should go on the adventure flight because the rest of the family was waiting for us. We agreed to take out hand of at the same time. We went to the adventure flight, which is a 4D movie thing. We sat down and started the flight it was 3D plus we could smell things and when we went through the artic it snowed on us, it was actually just soapy water that landed on us. Then the movie was over and the whole time of the movie both Frasers and my hade hurt so much. A little bit after that we realized that the hand that we held on the ice as a little bit swollen. Then we got a bit to eat the Astronauts the dome movie started. We sat in a chair and the movie screen was on the curved celling of the dome. It was a very cool way of watching a movie. After the movie was done we left Our Dynamic Earth. The next thing that we did was go to the Scottish parliament. We got a tour and history of the whole building. She told us about the them of the relatively new building, it had to do with a tree coming out of the ground, boats in a harbor, and the Saltire cross(the cross on the Scottish flag).The tour took us about an hour and a half.  It was very interesting how the architect put all of these aspects in the building but you could not see them unless you were looking for them. After that we had a bit of extra time before our dinner reservation so we drove around a bit and did a bit of sight seeing.  We had dinner at some Italian place…although we were all stuffed! We ate so much anyway. After dinner we went across the street to se the play  “Legally Blonde.” Just as we were on our way to our seats the boys realized that they were going to see a chick flick, it was really funny. The play was good but didn’t end until 10:30. Since we all got up at 7:00 we were extremely tired. We got in the car to go to the hotel but we got lost on our way there so instead of it taking 10 or 15 minutes to get there it took more like 30 minutes. Then it took a long time to check in but finally at about 11:15 we got to our rooms. Flora and I stayed in one room and Lachlan and Fraser stayed in another and John and Christine stayed in another. Flora and I went to our room first and looked around it. It was all very fancy. We first looked at the shower and were confused. I was the most high tech shower I have ever seen neither of us knew how to work it. After a bit we went to bet and soon found out that our room was right beside a train track. I think 5 or more trains went by that night…they were so noisy. We got up at 8:00 the next morning so that we could be down at the lobby by 9:30. That morning we went for breakfast at tescos(a grocery store). It was okay but not crazy good either. After breakfast we went to Edinburgh castle. It was very cool. I found out that it was built on a dead volcano; the queen still visits that castle for the day but never stays over night. It had many cool and weird things like they had a war memorial were we found Floras great uncle in one of the memorial books from World War 2. They also had a chapel, which is the oldest building in Edinburgh, you can even have your wedding there if you wanted to but the chapel could only hold 25 people at maximum. They also had a dog cemetery for the soldier’s dead dogs.  After we finished our tour of the castle we went for lunch at an ice cream parlor called S. Luca. We had lunch then dessert, for dessert everyone chose a reasonable ice cream but Flora and I did not. We got “La Montaga.” It was a 8 scoop ice cram thing with whip cream, chocolate, caramel, and strawberry sauces, chocolate chips, hazelnuts, lots of banana. It came I a large goblet and was MASIVE!!!! We finally finished it after a while but near the end it got quit gross. It had a mixture of all the ice creams with the sauces and it was not a good combination. After this we started our long journey home. That is the end of our very long weekend in Scotland. Look out for the next blog about Crieff next weekend.