an edinburgh getaway - flora and fauna

The final day of our Edinburgh break was spent exploring the city - to the point of exhaustion! We squeezed in a lot. We managed to visit a couple of museums and art galleries, took a city bus tour and a tour of some underground houses that was pretty cool, as well as lunch and seeing a few monuments.. My absolute highlight was the National Museum of Scotland which had a great collection. I have an amazing weakness for taxidermy and tend to hunt them out in whatever city I visit. They also had an old Columbian printing press on display in the main hall (the second photo) which was one of the kind of presses that I used at university. It was quite weird to see this on its own, and I really appreciated how beautiful they are as machines - the print room at uni was quite crowded so you couldn't appreciate the eagle and everything.. 

And speaking of birds, I made friends with this lovely crow whilst we were on the bus tour!

I know these posts have been rather spread out but I wanted to get most of these photos up on my blog without bombarding you all with them!

an edinburgh getaway (sort of) - country

I recently told you about going to Edinburgh, but one of the days we took a day trip out to Loch Ness and Uruqhart Castle, stopping briefly at Glen Coe on the way up. It was really lovely, we had really amazing weather for the whole trip, and the sunset over the loch on the boat ride back to the coach was really lovely. I highly recommend taking a trip outside of Edinburgh if you're visiting - however I think the time you're there needs to be taken into account. We were only there for two full days, and spending most of the day travelling (about five hours driving) probably wasn't the best use of our time, but it was really lovely to see some the countryside, and I did get to do some bird watching (fairly certain I saw an eagle!).

an edinburgh getaway - town

I recently came back from a far too brief visit to Edinburgh. I've been struggling a lot with my mood of late (as I do every January and February - they are bad months for me) and it was a great little trip to take my mind off a few things. It's been somewhere I've wanted to visit for such a long time, and finally got the chance too. Me and a friend managed to squeeze in a lot in the two and a bit days that we were there, but I really enjoyed it, overall. It was a very beautiful city that I could really see myself living in, in the future... 

These photos are from the first day we got there, we walked up to the castle and the sun was setting over the city, stopping in St. Giles Cathedral on the way back. It was great to see the city on the first day like that, thankfully we were staying just off the Royal Mile so it was a really good place to get to-and-from locations. 

So it wasn't exactly a 'winter sun' break, but we were very lucky with the weather and it was a lovely little time away.