• Mood: satisfied

A little trip to Edinburgh ...

... although I'm starting to think of Edinburgh as being ... not "far away", as such, but certainly not "near". This is silly, because I've driven longer drives (mostly in terms of time taken, although sometimes distance too) between suburbs in Melbourne.
Anyway, rwrylsin and I were heading over to meet a bunch of LJers, eat/drink nice things, and perhaps catch a castle on the way through, and we managed all that quite successfully.
We started at Elephants and Bagels - which is decorated with bagels all over the walls, and serves a delicious range of elephant (or is it the other way around ?). We met yonmei, hfnuala, starbrow, guybles, Cat (no LJ, and I may have the name wrong !) there. I had a bagel (this is unusual; normally I find them a bit too dense or doughy or something, but a toasted & buttered sesame seed bagel went down nicely), and listened to the conversation. After that we wandered along to "Plaisir du Chocolate" and met up with diotina, 0olong, and piscia (I may have that wrong too ! Darn my poor hearing-discrimination-in-noisy-places), and had a verrry nice hot chocolate (with whiskey and cream) and sat around chatting some more. All good (and tasty !) fun.
We all left sometime after three, and rwrylsin and I decided we'd just have time to get back to the car and drive down to Craigmillar Castle before 4pm (when they'd stop admitting people) and wander around there until 4:30pm (when they'd start kicking people out). Craigmillar is well worth a visit - especially if you're fond of the half-ruined type of castle rather than the maintained-and-modernised type (think Historic Scotland vs National Trust :-) ). We'll definitely have to visit it again with more time and maybe a bit more warmth (cold and windy and occasional rain all day; when I went to bed it was snowing lightly, and we woke up to find a dusting of snow over things, but that quickly got washed away by the rain).
Finally, we drove around a bit until we felt we had room for dinner, and headed to the Toby Carvery (errr, around the Corstorphine area, I think) for a delicious roast meat and vegie selection, then drove on home. Now, since we finally remembered to set the VCR before going out on a Sunday, we can sit down, eat dessert, and watch the new Time Team episode from earlier today ... A very pleasant day indeed.