Scotland Trip: Edinburgh Part 1

Hi friends! I’m so excited to be sharing my trip to Scotland with you all! We had the best time and I truly wasn’t ready to come home yet! Scotland is so beautiful, and we were lucky to have some great weather. It only rained two days while we were there, the rest of the days were sunny and warm. We based in Edinburgh (pronounced Ed-in-borough) and took day trips/excursions from there and it went so smoothly. I’m going to be organizing these posts by location and not in chronological order. There will be two posts about Edinburgh, one about our day in St. Andrews, one about our day trip to the Highlands, and the last post will be our three-day trip to the Isle of Skye. I hope you all enjoy, and these posts inspire you to see the beauty of Scotland for yourselves. Now let’s get to it!

Ever since I went to Greece with my family I’ve been inspired to travel and see more of the world. That trip really opened up my eyes and made me realize there’s so much see. I never had a true urge to travel until I went on that trip. I was dying to see more of the world, but I was so busy this past year with moving and getting settled that it wasn’t the best time to plan a big trip. I got settled and started thinking about places to go that would be a good first international trip for me to plan.

Last summer one of my favorite bloggers posted about her trip to Scotland and Ireland and ever since I really wanted to see the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, so I thought a trip to Ireland and Scotland would be the perfect vacation. I figured it wasn’t that far away and there wasn’t a language barrier, so it would be a good beginner trip. I started looking through Pinterest and created a list of all the destinations that I wanted to go to on both countries. I put together an itinerary and put it on Tripadvisor and everyone said that it would be best to see one country to really take it all in given the amount of time we had. Therefore, I decided to stick with Scotland and leave Ireland for the future. I started planning a wonderful 9-day trip to Scotland and I’m so excited to be sharing out trip with you all. Now onto what you’ve all been waiting for 🙂

Jon and I flew from JFK to Edinburgh late Thursday night. We actually took the subway to JFK airport and then a little tram. This was our first time trying that route and we actually preferred it to a cab because we didn’t have to worry about traffic. We both only brought carry-ons which I think is totally doable for Scotland, they dress very casually so we didn’t have to bring any fancy clothes. We only slept an hour or two on the plane, so we didn’t know what kind of day we would have. We landed at 9am to an absolutely beautiful day!

We took a tram from the airport right to downtown Edinburgh and it dropped us off a block from our hotel, it was perfect! The tram was about 7 pounds round trip so I’d definitely recommend this over a cab/driver. We dropped off our bags at the hotel (they will hold your bags for you all day and even held our bags on our three day trip!) and headed to coffee! We went to the Milkman and had oat milk cappuccinos. An interesting thing about Scotland cafes is that there’s no almond milk at any of them, just soy and oat milk. The coffee was delicious, and the inside was neat too.

After we were caffeinated, we walked up the Royal Mile to the castle! I love that you can see the castle from almost any part of Edinburgh. It sits upon an old volcano at the top of the city.

Every day at 1pm they shoot off a canon and we got to see it – very neat!

It was very windy at the castle and so beautiful! I loved the views of the ocean as well.

We were very hungry after touring the castle so we went to The World’s End and got fish and chips. This building actually used to be the very edge of the city a long long time ago.

This is one of my favorite pictures that I took, you can see a little rainbow by the sun.

I loved the architecture of the city and how they haven’t modernized the city.

This is the Royal Mile, which is longer than an actual mile, but the strip of where most of the tourists are in Scotland. The Royal Mile starts at Edinburgh Castle and ends at Holyrood Palace where the Queen of England resides when she visits Scotland.

We signed up for a ghost tour and it was so fun! Our guide was extremely interactive with the group and quite funny. It was fun learning about the darker history of Scotland. We did a little walk of the city and went in a graveyard and then in a secret crypt. I would highly recommend this tour to anyone visiting Scotland!

We stayed at the hub by Premiere Inn on Rose Street and had a great experience! The hotel was clean, in a great location, and the staff was so friendly. The best part was that they held our bags for us when we went on our three-day trip, and before we could check in. I would definitely recommend this hotel. The room was small, but we didn’t have any issues with that.

That wraps up our first day in Scotland. I’ll be sharing Edinburgh part two this week so stay tuned 🙂