A Day in the Life: Scotland/Ireland trip

Mike and I made our second voyage without the children at the beginning of this month. My friend Jen and her husband Matt and daughter Maggie are living in Edinbugh, Scotland due to his work. We had promised that we would visit them when they were over there. Who doesn't want to travel to a European country when you have a place to stay and tour guide?!? We had always envisioned taking the kids with us, but smartly put on some sense glasses and decided it was best for them to stay. Arrangements had been made with Pam and Jerry to watch the kids for us.

The vacation started off on a bad foot with me getting called in at 2 am the night before we left. You add a red eye flight and 5 hr time difference on top of that the following night and basically you are starting vacation "super cracked out" or a "hot mess", two of my favorite descriptive terms. Subsequent to this there were a list of other events that had a domino effect that turned this into a vacation that requires a vacation afterwards, to put it mildly.

We had a fabulous time when we were there. The weather was a bit dreary mostly, and it is light out at about 4 am to 9 pm, which was actually helpful for me. We managed to rally for the afternoon that we got there and did the hop on hop off bus to get a general layout of the city. Overall Edinburgh is a quiet, peaceful city, nestled in natural beauty with both old and new architecture giving it a very intelligent and peaceful feeling to it. There is the castle that sits atop a large volcanic rock that overlooks and generally defines the city it is imposing subtleness. It is a hilly place with some streets crossing over other streets like bridges.

We really only had two full days and the cracked out half day there before we took a hopper over to Dublin for the night by ourselves. We managed to do it up, without super overdoing it, and Jen and Matt were very gracious hosts and tour guides. It was probably the first vacation that Mike has ever been on where we really didn't do any recon on it before we left. I have never seen Mike so unprepared. He quickly brought himself up to speed once we got there though.

We ate at a real local type pub and had the haggis. We went on a ghost tour at night and saw the castle during the day. I went for a run with Matt which was a great way to see the city. Honey and Jeff came through the city and we had dinner with them on Sunday night as well. We visited the castle and climbed Arthur's seat. We lunched, we dined and we even watched Trainspotting (which took place in Edibugh). It was a true mixture of local and tourist trip. All in 2.5 days.

On Tuesday morning we left early and caught a flight to Dublin to spend the night there. By the time we got to our hotel and checked in it was just past 11 am. We again jumped on the hop on, hop off bus and promptly hopped off at the Guinness Factory. Definitely a tourist trap, but what can you do. It was a very modern and fairly entertaining tour and the free pint was good in the empty belly since we couldn't managed to get our s%^t together to get some lunch. Overall Dublin had a much more modern city feel to it, which for whatever reason was surprising to Mike and I. Not sure what either one of us expected, but it was definitely a surprise for us. Mike had secured us a heady restaurant reservation no doubt, and then we went out to a pub to drink some pints and hang out. Fortunately we didn't have to leave exceptionally early the next day, although it turned into an epic traveling day for me.