The #1 tourist attraction

It is, of course, the Edinburgh castle which sits high on a hilltop. Luckily, the Hop On bus which we used for transportation today, takes you most of the way up. Having the no queue ticket paid off. We took the free short tour led by a young cute boy so we listened intently. He said there's been a structure on the site for 3000 years. The oldest building, St. Margaret's Chapel,  still standing is 900 years old because the rest had been razed by King Edward Longshanks (the hammer of the Scots) who said all insurgent Scottish structures had to be destroyed. 

One of the interesting structures is the prison where prisoners of war, including 15 American sailors, were kept  during the American  Revolution.  They were artisans who left several of their creations including an ivory-carved box and bamboo and straw caskets (the small boxes). All the prisoners became experts at creating forged bills; they carved the designs into mutton bones. They needed the money to get somewhere once they got out of prison.  There were carvings and graffiti  on the massive wooden doors including the first outlines of the Stars and Stripes carved by the Americans.

There's a large monument to fallen soldiers from WWI on. The structure is impressive and it contains books that list every service person who was killed. We found some McKees but we other two apparently have no Scottish roots.

View from the Castle

Castle Gate

I had written much more on this entry, including really exciting stuff like what we ate for lunch and dinner but, unfortunately, my computer does not usually connect to the internet for some reason. Therefore, I'm just posting this so everyone knows we're still in Scotland where it seems to never rain.