Edinburgh, Day 1!

Our adventures in Edinburgh were so eventful that I'm going to make an entry for each day! Some of the photos were taken with my compact camera, some with the DSLR. That really depended on whether it was raining or not. I've also abandoned Picasa Galleries and uploading straight to blogspot because the quality is so poor so I created a Photoshop.com account for family/personal photos.

On Sunday, we set off an hour late because the sat nav wouldn't recognize any Edinburgh postcodes so Steve was struggling to get the hotel address up. Eventually, we got on the road and passed the driving time with the book of "If" questions.

Once there, we checked in and then got a Sunday roast at a pub called the Royal McGregor. It was a small place but we got seated right away. The food was pretty good but the gravy a little salty.



Not surprisingly, it was raining! I took some pictures but later got some of the same area when it wasn't raining. We wandered around in the rain and stopped at the "West End Fair" which was a disappointment. It was supposed to be an arts and crafts fair but there was all of about 10 stalls and a kind of creepy street performer, lol.

We then went back to the hotel to relax for a hour or so before going to the "Foodie Tents" - a bunch of stalls of local restaurants, farmers, etc selling products. It was much better than the West End Fair. Mom would have really liked the stall for "The Really Garlicky Company". We tried some "Fruit Ice" which I thought would be like water ice but it was much creamier - which is weird because there was no ice cream in it. It was really good but only available locally: Belhaven Fruit Farm. I don't normally drink hard cider but I tried some from a stall that was really good so I bought a bottle. Lastly, we got some dried apple crisps which are super healthy and apparently sold at Sainsbury's so we'll be looking out for those: Snapz Crisps.

Rain Factor: off and on by that point. It stopped long enough for me to grap a picture of part of the mountains/park next to the tents (I got more pictures of that another day so this is just a preview).



Later, we saw comedian Jimmy Carr. Steve really likes him, I think he's just okay. He does make me laugh sometimes but I'm not fond of his delivery style. He's big on one liners and I just feel like after every joke there should be cheesy drums going off.

I think I mentioned everything from Sunday. Check out the Photoshop Gallery for more pictures and stay tuned for Day 2! There will be video! Ooooooo!

Happy 4th of July from England!

Tonight, Amanda and I are going to Ladies Night! Another one of the players is celebrating his 10th year with the team and it's customary for him to hold several events for it. There's a fancy dinner dance one, a golf day, a ladies night, etc.

So anyway, I decided to go shopping for something to wear last minute and while at the Trafford Centre, Selfridges (a department store) had a bunch of American food brands you don't normally find over here for the 4th of July! Steve tells me they always have this stuff at Selfridges (they just had it out on the front display for Independence Day) but I'm sure if I'd known that, I would have taken advantage of it before now!

On another happy note, Salford had a surprising win last night against St Helens - haven't had time to process the pics from it yet but for now, here's a picture of all the American foods I got at Selfridges (yes, that's our couch in the background). I'm now off to get ready for Ladies Night - hopefully I'm not too worse for wear tomorrow for webcam! lol