We must have been to Edinburgh more than half a dozen times and after so many visits we are still finding new things to see and do.
I’m not sure why we have never been to The Elephant House before because it does tick all the boxes for us: Tea & coffee ✓, Caramel Shortbread ✓and a Harry Potter connection ✓. Here, the story goes, is where JK Rowling wrote the first outlines of the Harry Potter stories before she made so much money she could choose to write the rest literally anywhere she fancied.
A friend of ours suggests that you should never go to somewhere that is more famous for something other than its food and drink but in this case we felt fairly safe having only a cup of tea and a coffee. Despite it not being long since breakfast we also had a caramel shortbread too. I have come to the conclusion that Scotland has the best caramel shortbread anywhere (outside my mother’s kitchen) and I’d be happy to have a load shipped back home.
Next we were once more up Carlton Hill, an old favourite. I’m not entirely sure why becuase when you get up there it is an odd assortment of what can only be described as follys but the views over the city and beyond are great.
From there we walked to the other end of town. Generally Edinburgh is an attractive city but Princes Street is a depressing place what with the closed shops mingling with the mobile phone shops and the vagrants. Fortunately there are several parallel streets which are a much better options. We walked up through St Andrew Square and down the wide George Street before heading back to St John’s church at the end of Princes Street. In the church were thousands of origami cranes everywhere you looked. It made for a beautiful display.
We had just the one show today which was by the same group that had put on the James Taylor & Carol King Story that we had seen on Monday. This time it covered artists from Laurel Canyon and was equally as good – lots of feel good music and singing along.
Tomorrow’s our last full day here and Simon Evans is going to have to pull out all the stops to take our festival top spot!