Travel

Visiting Edinburgh

I had my first trip outside of Belfast with Sean earlier this month. We went to Edinburgh, Scotland for four days and three nights.
Sean booked the tickets before Christmas as a surprise but he’s a typical man and didn’t shop around for plane tickets. Altogether, the plane tickets cost nearly £200 and we flew from Belfast International Airport using Easy Jet. If you were to buy tickets now (and properly shop around) you could get two tickets for anything from £74-130 depending where you fly from.
It would have cost us nearly £20 to get a return bus ticket to the airport so we decided to use the park and fly services as it was £22 and meant we could just drive home when we got back on the Sunday night. For those of you that want to use park and fly, I’d advise you to book directly from Easy Jet or the airports website as most third party sites didn’t work for me.
I’m not a huge fan of Easy Jet just because I’m used to travelling with hand luggage and a hand bag rather than just one hand luggage bag. Saying that however, the flight was like half an hour (if that) and when coming back, we ended up sitting at the front where we had got chatting to the NICEST cabin crew. Their customer service went above and beyond and it made the experience even better!

Anyway, we used Airbnb for the first time as well and stayed in a place called Leith which is about 10 minutes in an Uber to Edinburgh centre one way and 10 minutes to the beach the other way. We stayed with Keith who wasn’t there most of the time meaning we had the place to ourselves most of the weekend. I’d been sooooo nervous about using Airbnb because although the place looked great on the pictures and was cheap (£104), I thought it would end up becoming a horror story. Thankfully I was wrong. It was such a lovely, clean flat and easy to get to so anyone looking to stay in Edinburgh, if you come across Keith, make sure you book with him! He was lovely too!
Edinburgh is well known for it’s festivals and all the writers that have gotten inspiration for their stories like J.K Rowling in the Harry Potter books and even Ebenezer Scrooge from the Charles Dickens novella (which I never knew). There’s so much you can do that even when you have an itinerary, it’s very hard to stick to it.

We happened to go the weekend of St Patricks day. Who books to go to Scotland for St Patricks day when you live in Ireland?! Apparently a lot of people do and I had to eat some humble pie. We also happened to go the weekend when Scotland played Italy (so the place was packed with Italians) and Ireland played England in the Six Nations.
We spent most of the weekend walking and taking in the culture just because there was so much to see. There is so much culture! In between that we went to museums and churches (all free) and we found a cute little Irish pub on the royal mile near the royal mile market which again was fab!

It’s no secret I’m a big foodie so of course we spent a lot of time eating in places like Red Squirrel, Noodle n Rice and The Malt Shovel Inn. Edinburgh has some pretty great places to eat and they serve some pretty great food at decent prices (if you don’t eat on the royal mile) but NOTHING and I mean NOTHING will ever beat a deep fried mars bar! No joke, I would fly back just to have one!

We saw everything from street magicians to people getting married on our walks. We also went on a guided tour around the city centre where we got to learn a it about the history of Edinburgh (which is SOOOOO interesting and cost just under £25) before spending a whole afternoon in Edinburgh castle. The castle on it’s own is amazing never mind the history behind it. We saw reenactments, visited museums and didn’t even have time for a guided tour!
I’d love to go back to Edinburgh. There was so much we didn’t see like the underground city, the dungeons and the beach. I would love to go on one of the tour buses that take you around Edinburgh because I’m sure there is a lot more we could learn.
This trip had a lot of firsts for me but overall, it was a lovely romantic weekend filled with Guinness, whiskey, a whole load of deep fried mars bars and culture. Even though it was quite cold, I couldn’t fault it and I really cant wait for my next adventure!

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