It is just mind blowing how fast this trip has gone. Each day seemed to last long, but as a whole, the two week adventure has flown by.
Today was our last full day in the UK, and I feel like it was the perfect sendoff from Scotland in particular. I started the day by joining Kayla, Angela, Jocelyn, and Robin at the Elephant House, infamously known as the “birthplace of Harry Potter,” for breakfast. Although my pancakes were no different than any of the others I consumed on the trip, it was still cool to just be in the environment J.K. Rowling was in while writing the first of the Harry Potter books and see the pictures of her hanging on the wall where it all began.
After we finished eating, we set off in search of souvenir shops, which weren’t hard to find. Edinburgh is such a beautiful place to just walk around and shop, so wasting time here never feels like a real waste. We decided we would take our handcrafted Starbucks beverages with us and sit on the hillside with the perfect view of the castle in the distance. With the sun shining on me and the slightest breeze in the air, I felt I could stay in that moment forever, but thanks to our allergies, we cut our resting short and headed to the hotel to freshen up for lunch.
We decided to eat a close pub named Innis & Gunn where I had a rather filling meal of baked mac n cheese and Parmesan chips. (Even though we’ve done a lot of walking on this trip, I think I’ll still be walking these meals off all summer.)
Following lunch, we headed to the hotel again, but this time to prepare for a group meeting. At said meeting, we all got to share what media visits we liked the most from the last half of our tour and what will stick in our minds about this experience in general. I said that this trip has certainly made me appreciate the little things back home, such as not paying to use the bathroom and good ole tap water (not a fan of sparkling), as well as the sights from England and Scotland that I will mentally carry with me, such as the castles and beautiful landscapes. Although there is “no place like home,” I really love traveling to new places and feel so thankful that I had the opportunity to fly across the ocean to countries I have always dreamed of visiting.
Once we all shared at the group meeting, we made our way to dinner at Howie’s, a restaurant near our hotel. The meal was good, but the portions were a little small so it was good I had a big lunch. We didn’t have much time to let our food settle, however, because it was off to the ghost tour from there!
Since I’m writing my website article on this visit, I won’t go into too much detail now, but I have to say that my 58 minute voice memo of the tour will be hilarious to replay when I hear the tour guide, Jane, “whipping” Diego and Craig. During the tour, she took us to closes and told stories that I felt were a little more gory and disturbing than actually scary, but she did conclude the night with a visit to the Blair Underground Vaults, located below Mercat Tour’s building.I will admit that I did get spooked in this dark, musty, and tight space and wondered the whole time if I was going to catch a glimpse of the supposed Cobbler, one of the characters from her stories. The tour ended with no sightings though, and some of us made our way back to the hotel bar after to calm our nerves a bit.
Before going to bed, I made sure my luggage was packed and prayed it would meet the weight limit (spoiler: I met the limit with one pound to spare). Then I laid down with images of one armed criminals and skeletal remains in my head (pleasant, I know). In just a couple hours, I would be heading to the airport and saying goodbye to this beautiful country until my next visit. As I said before, it was the perfect sendoff.
