northern lights, or not.

I didn't want to get you too excited that I actually saw the Northern Lights. But now you're probably all disappointed, but I promise you the adventure trying to see the Northern Lights is equally entertaining to read!
So I think it was maybe two weeks ago, there was a good chance to see the Northern Lights, albeit not cloudy and the moon not too bright. So my friend Elizabeth and I decided it would be fun to climb Arthur's Seat when it got late at night to try to see some cool lights. Well the only lights we saw were the city lights because even though Arthur's Seat is high up, it's still too close to the city. I'll never say this again, but thank goodness for light pollution because we didn't have a flashlight so if there hadn't been any pollution we would not have been able to climb Arthur's Seat at all. Granted, having a flashlight still would have helped a lot because we had no clue what we were doing. We followed the closest trail that had rock steps up for a while and then it mysteriously ended. So we forged our own path for a bit, only to be stopped by a large rock face that we attempted to scale and then came to our senses about. So we turned around and tried the other way, getting nowhere. Shortly after we walked back down a ways, we saw a group coming down so we scampered up the way they were going down.We ended up at the top of a completely grassy hill.  Not yet Arthur's Seat. We panicked for a moment that the two weren't connected but after tramping our way through the cushy grasses, we discovered they were in fact connected. Only then we lost the trail again. Thankfully, we ran into another group coming down this crevice and they assured us it was much easier to climb up it than it was to go down it like they were. So we shimmied our way up this crevice and realized we'd made it to the top of Arthur's Seat! Praise the Lord. It was so windy, so we didn't stay up there for long, just long enough to take some photos and video of the howlin' winds. So much for seeing the Northern Lights. But it was still quite nice up there, seeing the whole city in the dark, yet lit by all the buildings' lights. Coming back down was a whole nother adventure. There was no way we were going to be able to figure out how to go down the way we came up, so we just kinda wandered our way down. We ran across the grassy hill and got nowhere, so somehow we found a little path and followed it down. We ended up walking through what was basically a little forest. The trees were squeaking in the wind. It was kinda creepy, especially since we had no clue where we were going to pop out. The path surprisingly popped out at the road and we realized we were all the way on the back side of Arthur's Seat. I don't think I'd ever been that happy to make it onto a road. [I was going to say solid ground, but the path we were walking on was solid, it was just unknown. haha] So that's pretty much it. We didn't see the Northern lights, but we did experience some strong winds and some scary wandering in the dark. It was awesome!
Now for Edinburgh Castle. We toured that just this past weekend. It was a gorgeous day [as it has been a lot this past week/2 weeks or so. It was quite a steal because we went with the ISC so we paid a fraction of the price and didn't have to stick with them once we got in there. We got to see the city from the battlements and I pretended to shoot a cannon. We saw the Great Hall and where Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to James VI. We saw the prisons where they kept POWs which was really cool. Also got to go to the Scottish War Museum and saw lots of guns and outfits and stuff. ha. One of the neatest parts of the castle tour was seeing the crown jewels: the sword, crown, septre and the Stone of Destiny. We couldn't take pictures so you'll just have to imagine the shiny jewels and such. We spent almost 2 hours walking through the castle and it was so amazing. It was like a small town. Although there wasn't a lot of rooms that we were allowed to explore, but what we could see was legit.
Tonight I'm going to an event called "Around the World in 80 Cultures" with food and other cultural things and tomorrow I'm seeing The Hunger Games at 'midnight'...it's actually at 8pm, but it's the premiere here! Then Friday it's off to the Isle of Skye! So there's a lot of good blogging material ahead and I can't wait to tell you!

Arthur's Seat at night

Boom.

Prisoners' living quarters

Key to the castle!