We packed up and headed for Edinburgh. Since we had plenty of time, we took the "blue highways", the smaller roads. It was a beautiful drive. We only got lost once, and Geepers, as we call our GPS system, got us back on track nicely. As you might guess, the country side was green hilly, and full of sheep.
Lots and lots of sheep.
We stopped in Hawick in Scotland for lunch. (BTW, when you see underlining, the text is enabled as a hyperlink and you should be able to click on it to get more information). It was a very nice small town (maybe 20,000)--very Scottish much like Salina, Kansas would be very Kansasish (if that is a word). We found a small pub and ate lunch. Here is the specials' menu.
I asked what Mince and Tatties were. Tatties are just potatoes, coarsely mashed. Mince is ground beef in gravy with a few vegetables. Apparently Mince & Tatties (click for a recipe) is a Scottish tradition. We ordered that and lasagne. The lasagne was pretty standard, albeit with cheddar cheese instead of Italian cheese. Here is a pictures of the Mince and Tatties:
We made it to our hotel without any major problems, navigating through a ton of roundabouts. Geepers was wonderful.
We connected back to the Internet and called home with Skype. What a great service. $.02/minute with great quality. Then we went out and wandered around the town. The castle was closed, but even from the outside, it is spectacular.
More about the castle in a later post. We will visit it today. Then we walked down the major street full of tourist shops. It felt a little bit like walking around Times Square in NYC. Lots of Scotland trinkets and as you can guess, tons of tartan plaids in various forms.
St. Giles is a beautiful church just down the hill from the Castle.
We ended the evening in a restaurant called Stac Polly. It billed itself as a Scottish restaurant, which I suppose it was. The food was excellent and we had a nice dinner.
