Edinburgh

Now that I’m finally back to normal (almost, pesky tickly cough is driving me nuts!) I’m only now getting round to editing my photographs from Scotland. This set is from the day we climbed Arthur’s Seat….

My son, who never gets to choose what we do as a family, was asked what he wanted to do the day we had to drop my mum off at Edinburgh Airport. He wanted to go climbing he told us; he wanted to climb Arthur’s Seat.

So off we go from the Park-and-ride at Edinburgh Airport on the tram to the city centre. I had a rough idea of where it was (behind the castle somewhere) so we decided to walk towards where we thought it was. Long story short is we found it in a roundabout kind of way. My family and friends always laugh at my directions because whenever anyone asks me where something is my reply is always “it’s just around the corner”. I actually have a good sense of direction, but maybe not as good a sense of distance.

Anyway we eventually end up at the bottom of Arthurs Seat and husband and I say to the kids that we are going up the ‘easy’ way and they can go up the hard way. I had looked it up on The Google and it said there were two ways to climb it. I should also have looked it up on a map because what we pointed out to the kids wasn’t Arthur’s Seat at all. It was Salisbury Crags. We didn’t realise this until our ‘easy’ route rounded the corner and there was an even bigger hill behind the one we’d just pointed the kids towards! About an hour later, after much huffing and puffing on my part, we reached the top and of course no kids! They’d done what we’d said (for once in their lives) and stayed at the top of the hill and didn’t move till we get there as none of our phones worked in Scotland apart from husbands. Well daughter is a sensible type, she is the one you’d call in a Zombie Apocolypse to help you out; son is the phone-a-friend in Who Wants to be a Millionaire, ie. no use in a crisis! We were certain she’d find wi-fi somewhere, which she did as Edinburgh actually has city-wide free wi-fi, so when she texted us with “where are you!” we were on the way back down.

Poor boy – the one thing he wanted to do the whole fortnight was climb Arthur’s Seat and he didn’t even get to do that. We offered to wait at the bottom till he climbed up it by himself, but by this time he was starving and food was more important than climbing. He did say he’d enjoyed climbing the Salisbury Crags though, and judging by the photos his sister took of him, I’m glad I wasn’t there to see him scale parts that were pretty dangerous looking to me. Yes, I’m a paranoid mum. Yes, he’s 20 years old, but he’s still my wee boy!

So here are some photographs from the top of Arthur’s Seat which I am happy to say I climbed without the need of oxygen!