Saturday, June 29, 2024

This post is part two of June 29, but the beginning of our Scotland trip. The trip from Grantham to Leeds was uneventful.

But I made a major mistake, which cost me much anxiety and also cash. Pay attention to what ticket actually says people.

What you see above is the route that the LNER trains take from King’s Cross station all the way north to Inverness. This is the route I had embedded in my mind, which would have been fine if I didn’t forget that we needed to not only switch trains at Leeds, but we also needed to switch train companies.

As you can see, Leeds train station is large which won’t surprise many people because of its size. It surprised me because I’m not familiar with sizes of cities in the United Kingdom. According to 2024 stats, the city proper has over 536,000 people while the City of Leeds Metropolitan Borough has over 820,000.

I love train stations and would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been so nervous about getting on the next train. The paranoia didn’t help because I should have looked at my itinerary more closely, which clearly stated that we had to ride a Cross Country Train from Leeds to Edinburgh.

Instead, in my haste (and my anxiety in the crowd that pushing to get on the train) I asked a porter, but she was clearly in a hurry and focused on the very large crowd getting on the train and told us it wasn’t our train. Jane warned me, saying there were no other trains scheduled to Edinburgh, but I relied on the person in uniform instead.

I was wrong.

Fortunately, we were able to buy other tickets to get to Edinburgh and were able to get seats. I was so flustered that at one point, i thought I had even lost my ticket! I really feel like I need to go back to Leeds just to erase the bad memory of the train station, which was no one’s fault but my own.

Note: The crowd that was in a hurry to get on the train was probably because not everyone books train tickets with seats so if you don’t have a confirmed seat, it can be a problem, especially if you also have bags.

Interestingly enough, most of the large crowd that got on the train when we finally got on the next one to Edinburgh, got off at the next stop: York. They didn’t have to stand very long and is probably why they didn’t bother walking through the cars to find if there were any seats.

We were luck and found seats and places for our bags. If it weren’t for the cost, I would have been thankful to be on this train rather than the other because there were still less people on our train.I’m wondering if there was a football/soccer game happening or something.

Once, we were settled, I could finally enjoy the train trip. It was a lovely day. I hadn’t quite figured out how to get pictures from the train without the reflection, but please believe me when i say the countryside was beautiful.

When we go to the outskirts of Berwick-upon-Tweed, we even got to see the North Sea!

More picture of Berwick-upon-Tweed, the last town in England before the border to Scotland on our route.

Arriving in Waverley station in Edinburgh, puts you smack in the middle of things. We left the station, climbing the stairs to arrive on Princess Street. We were staving, so before we even went to look for our apartment, we grabbed a Cornish pasty at The Pasty Shop which was probably the first food place we saw out of the station. I have rarely passed up an opportunity to buy a pasty.

Then we walked along Princes Street Gardens past the statue of Livingston to get to the amazing Scott Monument.

I really need to go back to Edinburgh because even though we spent a couple of days there, I never really got to walk around in the gardens, which looked lovely from this level and the next day from the top of the tour bus. At 37 acres, there is clearly a lot of area to cover, so it’s on my list to explore the next time I’m in Scotland. I really do want to go back.

From there, we walked to to our short stay apartment which was only about a mile from the train station in the Cannon Mill area.

It was a beautiful day, and we got to see some of Edinburgh and the neighborhood in which we were staying. We walked through the area called known as New Town first.

And here is the neighborhood where we stayed. I love the stone. It’s something I miss about living in Philadelphia. We do not have stone houses/buildings/apartments like this in Massachusetts.

We did not stay on Eyre Place. I just took a picture because I’m a fan of Jane Eyre (no connection).

Our apartment was fantastic and perfect location. I would stay there in a heartbeat. I’d buy it to live in permanently if I could afford it, even though I don’t need a space this big just for myself. It’s within walking distance of everything: grocery store, bus station, and train station. Jane picked a great spot.

I actually liked having the toilet separate from the rest of the bathroom, too. I love taking long baths, and this means that I could do this without keeping Jane from going to the bathroom.

Here is view from the living room. The bedrooms face the street while the living room faced this nice courtyard area.

I also have to mention the stairwell. The only thing some people might not like is that the apartment is on the third floor, and there is no elevator, so it isn’t an accessible space. It didn’t seem that bad though. I feel like I’m more out of breath doing the stairs at work than I was lugging my carry-on and backpack up these stairs. But then again, none of our stairs are this pretty.

We went to the Tesco’s Superstore on Broughton Rd, which was about an 8-minute walk away. I must have been tired though because I have no pictures from that walk.

We ended the day putting our groceries away and trying to figure out the directions for the washer.

We had a busy day planned for the next day because we were going to try to manage the everything included in the Royal Edinburgh ticket, which you get two days to do, but we only had one day!