Monday July 17 2017 Edinburgh & St Andrews
Our hotel, Radisson Blu was a great location. We were only about a 10 minute walk to Edinburgh Castle entrance, so we got up early, grabbed breakfast and headed down to the castle. We were greeted by about 5,000 other people who had the same idea!!! Most of them were tour groups, so they already had their tickets. Our wait for tickets was only about 20 minutes, so not too bad.
The castle is amazing. We learned that there have been 26 sieges in its 1100-year-old history, giving it a claim to having been "the most besieged place in Great Britain and one of the most attacked in the world".
Once we finished touring the castle it was on the road again. We headed down to St Andrews, the birthplace of golf. John is hoping to join a threesome tomorrow. St. Andrews is a very busy town, as you can imagine with all of the golfers wanting to play here, so when we were booking rooms, the only reasonable rooms we could find were dorm rooms in Agnes Blackadder Hall at St. Andrews University. How pleasantly surprised were we! Each room was nice and clean, with a double bed and en-suite bathroom. The rooms reminded the Wetteraus of their college days in Athens, Ohio :-)
This was to be a Laundry Day since all dorms have washers/dryers. The check-in staff told us the laundry facilities were not reliable, and they were going to have us send our clothes out to be washed. Fortunately, as they were telling us that, a woman named Leslie walked by. Leslie is a supervisor at the dorms. She took Jeri and Reid to the laundry room, put her card in the machines and paid for all of our clothes to be washed and dried. Jeri and Reid stayed there to finish the laundry, while John and Blaine went over to check out the many golf courses. After the laundry was done, the four of us headed to dinner at Forgan Restaurant, and then a nice leisurely stroll around the Old Course. It was a beautiful evening!
Returning to the university, we set up in the student lounge (where they served food, beer and wine) to play Spades again. John and Blaine were quite happy with their very first win during this whirlwind Europe trip. Scotland (the 4th country the Wetteraus have visited on this trip) has been very, very good to the men's card team. We hope the luck continues for John tomorrow at St. Andrews Links :-)
