Edinburgh is amazing. I didn't expect to like it as much as I did, maybe because I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The streets are beautiful. All the buildings are really old and then of course there's Edinburgh castle in the middle of the town on a giant cliff side.

Edinburgh castle was one of the first things we saw after we got off the bus from the airport. We didn't do much on our first night in Edinburgh. We went to a pub around the corner from our hotel for dinner. They had red grape flavoured Bulmers. It was the greatest thing I think I've ever had to drink. We went back to our room afterwards and just chilled.

In the morning we set out to explore Edinburgh. We headed up to the castle to take a look around. There are mad views of Edinburgh from there. We didn't go inside because we were being cheap backpackers, so we went to the free kilt museum nearby instead. We walked around there for a while, and saw the tartan prints being made and what not, it was actually pretty cool. We went to check out the scotch distillery after that. The tour of that is really good! It starts with a movie about scotch, but you sit in a giant keg and it takes you for a ride through the various steps required to make scotch. We then went into a room where different toes of scotch were explained to the group, and we got to choose one to sample and got to keep the glass. We were then taken into a room with the largest scotch collection in the world. It was off its head. There was something like 3400 bottles in there, some were from the 1800's, it was amazing. We finished the tour by seeing the largest bottle of scotch in the world, which was just shorter than me in height. We had lunch at a little Scottish pub, and then walked around Edinburgh. We ended up getting lost, and walking for something like 3 hours. We went back to our room, had some dinner and then sat in bed and drank pretend baileys until Janet was awake so we could Skype her for her birthday.

The next day we had a tour booked to go to Loch Lomond and the highlands. Our Scottish guide picked us up from our hotel at 9am and the first place we hit was Glasgow. Our tour guide was hilarious. He was your typical Scotsman, he had the thick accent and had a classic Scottish attitude. He spoke over the microphone all day about Scotland and all the places we hit up. He really knew his s***. After Glasgow, we drove through the lowlands and wound up at Loch Lomond. We took a boat cruise along the loch, which was beautiful. It was so cold at the top of the boat but we managed to fight the cold to take as many mirror selfies as possible. After the cruise, we continued driving and stopped off just before we crossed into the highlands for a lunch stop. The town was perfect. It was the Scottish countryside down to a tee. It was just what you would expect, with the cute cobble stone lane ways and gorgeous old buildings, and there was a little lake with a bridge and sheep were there. It was so nice. We continued into the highlands and had a photo stop near a big lake with a castle and some highland cows, or "hairy coo's" as the Scottish call them. Our final stop on the tour was a town called Stirling. We stopped near the castle there, which also had mad views. We had a little walk around the town and took some photos before heading back to Edinburgh. Later that night we caught up with Brendan's cousin, Phillipa. We did our own mini pub crawl, and went to a few different pubs for some drinks. In one of the pubs we saw Roddy @ 9pm when the fun started. I have him a finger gun as we walked out, and because he was working his magic and playing the guitar he couldn't return my finger gun gesture, so he settled with a raise of the eyebrows. Brendan thought it was directed at him, but he didn't finger gun him, so obviously I was the one who Roddy loved.

On our final day in Edinburgh, we walked to a small town on the other side of town that Chris recommended to us. It was one hell of a walk. It tools us an hour, but we got to walk past Arthur's seat, so the views were amazing. We had lunch at a small pub called the Sheep Hied Inn, which had two skittle lanes out the back, so after lunch we hired the lanes for an hour. I fulfilled a life long dream and ran and slid down the bowling alley and got it on tape. I skinned my knees but it was so worth it. After we finished there, we walked all the way back. We ended up walking into Edinburgh rather than back to our room. We walked along Princes Street and did some shortbread shopping amongst other things. I resisted the urge to buy some sexy tartan pants, and we headed back to our room for an extra early night to prepare for our 5:45am bus to London.