The Castle, Whiskey and a Queen

This past weekend, we took the train up to Edinburgh, Scotland....the English countryside is beautiful! 

Berwyck upon Tweed...a small town we went through right before we got to Edinburgh.

We left London at Noon and arrived in Edinburgh 4 1/2 hrs later...

On Saturday, we got up and ventured up to the Castle. As you can see from the pictures below, it is set high up on a hill/cliff, and overlooks the whole city. 

The front gate of the Castle

St. Margaret's Chapel...the oldest building on
the grounds of the Castle and in Edinburgh. 
It was built around 1130.

The back of the National Shrine...inside it names the scottish soldiers killed in WWI and in later conflicts.

The front of The National Shrine

Since we arrived in Scotland, I wanted to find a place to try some different Scotches (a little side note...in Scotland they don't call it Scotch, they just call it Whiskey).  After our trip up to the Castle and lunch, we did find a place offering tours called The Scotch Whiskey Experience.  It was more of a tourist trap (if you couldn't tell by the name), fairly expensive and you only were able to try 1 whiskey.  However, they did have a restaurant and bar in the same complex...so instead of taking their tour, we just went to their bar and had our own little tasting.  They had probably over a hundred different kinds of Whiskeys, and we had the bartender gives us tastings of the ones she thought we'd like.  We tried 5 different ones, and it was a really great way to try some we had never heard of before.

On Sunday, we had some time to kill before we had to be at the train station and decided just to walk around seeing more of the city...

The Royal Mile (aka High Street) leading up to the Castle

St Giles' Cathedral

Inside St Giles

During our trek, we stumbled upon this church...

What is so special about this Church you might ask?  Well, we were thinking the same thing.  It was odd because the church had policeman in front checking id's and names of those trying to enter.  Also, you can somewhat see all the petitions being set up in the picture. 

Well, an hour later we had our answer...

That's right...we found ourselves about 6 feet away from the Queen!!!  We had heard on the news that she was in Edinburgh a couple of days before to open the Scottish Parliament.  What we didn't know is that she was staying  for the week and that we happened to be at her church at the perfect time :-)  We couldn't have planned it any better. 

We were very lucky not only because we got to see the Queen, but also because the whole time we were up in Scotland it never rained. If you know Scotland, you know that it rains probably 85% of the time. So our track record of bringing good weather is still with us ;-) 

We had a brilliant weekend, and hope to get back up to Scotland again.