I am sure you are asking, "Why were your bags so heavy?" Two reasons: (1) I have some gifts to bring to Roberta and her family. I carefully chose light weight gifts. Additionally I mailed a box to her with orders not to open it until I got there. It cost me $54 to mail that box. (2) When starting a trip on a cruise, you need more clothes because essentially you are having to wear two outfits a day - one for the day and a little more dressy at night. I did wear things twice and washed in the laundry on the ship. You need to have at least two pair of shoes just in case one gets wet. I had only two pair of shoes. Bill had four pair. He just had to bring his heavy sandals to go with his shorts.
We flew with a regional turboprop from Southampton to Edinburgh. They have VERY strict weight requirements for bags. For two people you can have a total of 40 kilos which is just over 80 pounds. Remember we started with 99 pounds of luggage in Memphis. The lady said one bag was OK and could go through but I would have to "rearrange", in other words lose some weight out of the bags. Bill was talking to her about extra charges and I was tricking her by putting heavier stuff in the bag that she said was OK. Pure genius! We still had to pay overweight charges of $81.50.
Here is my dilema: when flying to Belfast, we will again be on a regional jet that is even more strict about the weight. Their website says they will not let you on the plane if your bags exceed the weight. Bill said we would just have to leave clothes here in the hotel. I told him NO because it is hard to find fat woman's clothes. I told him to leave 3 pair of shoes.
I went to the front desk and asked about the nearest post office. At this point I am going to ship a bunch of shoes back with some non-necessary but things I am not going to donate to the housekeeper here. The front desk clerk found me a box (it said Office Depot on the side) and I stuffed as much as I could in it. I am going to take it to the post office tomorrow and see if they can tape it up and ship it home. I am sure it will be expensive but that beats missing a flight. If I don't make it home it means I refused to part with anything else.
We are staying at a Holiday Inn on Cowgate Street one block from the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. I chose it because of it's location, price, free WiFi, and free breakfast. What the guidebook I read didn't tell me was that to get from the hotel to the main street you have to walk up a ski slope! Anyway, the rooms are nice and the staff have been very patient with my incessant questions.
When we got here, we bought tickets for the Hop-on-and-Off bus to get an overview of the town. These hit all the major attractions. You wear ear buds and hear a guide telling you what you are seeing and giving you historical information. For some reason Bill would not wear the ear buds and kept asking me, "What's that?" My patience may be waning because I wanted to stick those buds in his ears or somewhere else.
We walked to Grassmartket St. which was apparently party central. There were some very strange people there. At one bar a bunch of guys were dressed like "Where's Waldo". I was staring at them and turned around to a guy mooning the whole group. It was rainy/misty weather but I saw the full moon.
We also went the Greyfriar's Cemetery which is the most haunted cemetery in the world. I didn't see any ghosts, probably because the full moon from Grassmarket was burned in my retinas.
We had a few pints at a nearby pub. The owner, Paul Mcsomething, was quite chatty. When he found out it was our anniversary, he got a card of Robert Burns (who was a famous Scottish poet and also the name of the pub) and had the employees sign it for us. I really appreciated that.
You didn't post a picture of the moon! Too bad you didn't see a ghost ... you could have asked her if she knows the Advent ghost. It is a small world, afterall.
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