Today we were taken on a tour of the city and then up to the Castle.\u00a0 On our way to the Castle we stopped at a little cemetery were our guide told us a story about two Irish men who started stealing freshly dead bodies and selling them to medical schools for 10 lbs each.\u00a0 Back in the day medical research could only be done on dead prisioners and no one else.\u00a0 These two men started raiding cemeteries for bodies.\u00a0 Afterwards watchtowers were put in one particular cemetery to stop them.\u00a0 They started going after people and getting them drunk until they would pass out, then put a pillow over their heads to smother them.\u00a0 Come morning they were dead and they would take them off to the school and get their 10 lbs each.\u00a0 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the book The Body Snatcher based on these two men.<\/p>\n
After our guide got us up to the castle and showed us around we were on our own.\u00a0 There are only two building in the entire castle area that you can not take pictures.\u00a0 One is the building the crown jewels are in and the other is the building where they have the books listing all the Scots soldiers that have died in battle.\u00a0 They have books with records dating back to 1914 to current.\u00a0 You can look through the books and see the names, what battalion they were in and when they died and how they died.\u00a0 The crown jewels were quite impressive as well.\u00a0 We toured the dungeons, as well as the chapel on the grounds.\u00a0 The chapel is the oldest building in Edinburgh.\u00a0 I think the chapel was build in 1091 and was left standing when Robert the Bruce tore the castle down.\u00a0 He got the castle back from the English but only after quite a few soldiers wee murdered to get it.\u00a0 He refused to stay in the castle after that and tore it down brick by brick but left the chapel standing.<\/p>\n
We were there when they shot the one o’clock gun was shot off.\u00a0 I got a movie but will post that to our photo website later.\u00a0 We haven’t pulled the castle pictures off our camera’s yet.<\/p>\n
After we left the castle we walked down part of the Royal mile.\u00a0 I would hate to see this place come July and August.\u00a0 It was like walking down the sidewalks in Las Vegas.\u00a0 The people were everywhere.\u00a0 The Royal mile is the old town and there are a lot of very neat old buildings.\u00a0 We took some pictures of the Closes as we went past.\u00a0 This is there version of an alley.\u00a0 Think Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter movies.\u00a0 The lamps no longer have colored glass in them but colored plastic.\u00a0 Still makes for very good photos though.<\/p>\n
Then we wandered back down the hill to the newer part of town and back towards our hotel.\u00a0 We met a couple of other women on the tour with us and we all went out to a pub for dinner.\u00a0 And yes, we got a traditional little hole in the wall pub.<\/p>\n
This concludes the Scotland portion of our tour.\u00a0 Tomorrow we are on our way to Ireland to start that part of our tour.\u00a0 Once we get to Dublin tomorrow we are on our own until the following day when that portion of our tour starts.\u00a0 Not sure yet what we will do but I’ll keep you posted.\u00a0 =)<\/p>\n
I’ll post more pictures as we get them all straightened out.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today we were taken on a tour of the city and then up to the Castle.\u00a0 On our way to the Castle we stopped at a little cemetery were our guide told us a story about two Irish men who started stealing freshly dead bodies and selling them to medical schools for 10 lbs each.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scotland-ireland-vacation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117,"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hollenbeck.ws\/travel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}