Originally published: 11/10/2015 | 10:08pm
This past summer I was fortunate enough to go to Europe with some of my good friends and favorite teachers on a group trip. For years my mom and I had talked about taking a family vacation to Europe once I graduated, but increasing travel costs made the idea seem like an unattainable dream. However, there was an extremely good deal on this teacher-lead group trip and my parents agreed to pay for me to go as a graduation gift. I got to spend a total of 12 days on this trip exploring Scotland, England (with a hint of Wales), and France. Due to this large number of events and locations this trip covered, I will be breaking down the storytelling of my experiences into 7 parts. I will post once a week on Tuesday for a total of 7 weeks (starting today). So, with that being said, I am going to start off with the first stop on my European Vacation: Edinburgh, Scotland.
As a group, we took an afternoon non-stop British Airways flight on June 25th to the United Kingdom so that we would arrive early morning the next day. We landed at Heathrow Airport in London to catch a connecting flight to Glasgow, Scotland. Once we got to Glasgow, we took a charter bus to Edinburgh and immediately started exploring the city. Our first day in Edinburgh was light due to the amount of flying we had just completed, but the second and third days were completely packed with tourist activities. We went to museums, did some shopping, and went on a ghost tour on Day 2 of our trip. On Day 3, we took a guided bus tour around the city that left us to continue our day along The Royal Mile. After spending about half of the day left to us at Edinburgh Castle, my friend and I walked along The Royal Mile in search of food, but found ourselves at St. Charles Cathedral instead. The church was beautiful, but due to its policies I was not allowed to take pictures of its interior. We decided to end our Royal Mile exploration a little early to walk to our dinner location (we ate traditional Scottish cuisine)* and afterwards, we went on a walking tour of Edinburgh.
While in Edinburgh, several members of our group wanted to climb to the top of King Arthur's Seat, a volcano nearby our hotel (at The University of Edinburgh). This was the highlight of my trip! It took a total of two hours to climb to the top, enjoy the view for a bit, and return to the base. We then got lost on the way back, but I never let that get me down (at least until I began to feel fatigued and hungry). Overall, this was the perfect way to end Day 3 of our trip and our last official day in Scotland.
If you feel like I rushed through my trip summary, it's because I did. I wanted to take the time to highlight some feature points of my time in Scotland and allow you to let my pictures give the details of the story. Here is the link to my Google Photos Collection from my Trip to Edinburgh: https://bit.ly/KTTinScotland.
*Note: The food in Europe was great! Keep following my blog to see pictures of what I ate.
Feel free to leave comments below, tweet (@KimiThoughts), or leave a post/message on Facebook (@KimisTravelThoughts) and share your stories and experiences with traveling to Scotland!
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