Edinburgh - Day 2
I wrote much of what is below yesterday afternoon. It is Thursday morning, June 26th, and it has been raining since about 1 a.m. It was still light at 10:30 last night, and I took out my iPhone and made the first and second images in the group I have linked to below.
We head home tomorrow, and I am ready to resume my "normal" life. So many things come to mind that I am unsure what to do first. I will start by taking a deep breath. Anyway, back to yesterday's entry:
Before I review our second day in Edinburgh, please allow me to take you back, back in time, using the Way Back Machine (a reference to Professor Peabody and Sherman from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle show from the 1960s), back to Monday, June 23rd, 2025, okay, not so far back. Monday was our last day in Robin Hood's Bay, and Therese had found a much heralded bird watching site called Bempton Cliffs—and the game was afoot (a paraphrase of, no, not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, but from Shakespeare's Henry V)!!!
So, we took a bus from Robin Hood's Bay to Scarborough (as noted yesterday, the Scarborough referenced in the song Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme by Simon and Garfunkel, which was a cover of an old English ballad), then a train to the small village of Bempton and finally a one and a half mile walk to the Cliffs. Around half a million seabirds gather here between March and August to raise a family on the towering chalk cliffs overlooking the North Sea. Our hope, Therese's in particular, was to see Puffins, Gannets, Fulmars, Razorbills and Guillemots. They are all beautiful birds, but the Puffins and Gannets are particularly stunning. You will need to look them up, as bird photography with an iPhone is like attempting to climb Mt. Everest in a Jeep.
Bird watching is like being a batter in baseball: Every so often, maybe three times out of ten, you see what you set out to see. Therese had been looking at the Bempton Cliffs Facebook site, which seemed to indicate it would be unlikely that we would see Puffins. In response to one visitor's complaint that they had seen only one Puffin, the response was that adult Puffins head out early in the morning for food to feed their young and often return late in the evening, and when not out feeding, they are in their burrows in the chalk cliffs. This time of year, here in the northern latitudes, the sun rises well before five am and sets after nine pm. The site is open from nine am to five pm! It seemed unlikely we would see Puffins.
Okay, the buildup is too long, so I will cut to the chase—we saw them all! There were thousands of Gannets flying around. They are big birds and hard to miss. The other species were harder to spot, but Therese was patient and diligent in looking through the thousands of birds, and found them all, even Puffins. It was a great day.
Back to today, Wednesday, June 25th, in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Today was one of the first mornings in memory when we could stay in bed, have a leisurely breakfast and not feel like we had to get out the door. We had a walking tour scheduled for ten am, an Old Town Walking Tour, History and Tales. It was led by, of all things, an Englishman and a historian, but a funny man with plenty of tidbits about the history of Edinburgh—great fun! We had lunch at Maggie Dickson's, named after Half Hangit Maggie Dickson (here is a link to the story https://maggiedicksons.co.uk), then it was off again to the Greyfriars Cemetery. I know, it seems like I am fixated on cemeteries, or seem so, but they are so photogenic! Anyway, for you animal lovers, here is the story of "Greyfriars Bobby" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby), an uplifting story, but still about death. There was a lot of killing, death, hanging and grave robbing going on in Edinburgh, back in the day!
Finally, we visited The Writer's Museum. The museum is focused primarily on three Scottish writers: Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. I could write an entire entry regarding the interesting tidbits I learned about all three writers. I need to read some of their works soon.
Here is a link to a few of today's images. I'm sorry if some are repeats of yesterday, and some images are from Bempton Cliffs. It is all beginning to blend into a blurry mess!
https://www.reedpikephotography.com/coast-to-coast-photos/edinburgh-day-2