Day 11: Monday, 10 August 1998

After the rest the previous day, I was up for going out and seeing something of the area--taking some sort of day trip. We'd haggled a lot over whether we wanted to actually leave the coziness of our apartments and get away from Edinburgh for a few days or not. In the end, we decided that just taking some day trips was probably the best bet since actually travelling distance meant taking time, which was really what we were short on.

Qarin decided immeadiately that she would rather spend a day by herself than try to deal with another day of group dynamics, which was probably a fine choice.

Robert, Seth and I decided to go out and see some castles. (Big surprise there.) We chose our castles by basically looking at a map and finding the nearest castle symbols. We also looked a bit in the Rough Guide for interesting day trips. By both methods Tantallon Castle looked pretty good, so we went there.

Me zonked out on the bus

I can't remember how we discovered which bus would get us near Tantallon Castle, but once we got on, the driver assured us that we were in the right place and that he would let us know when to get off.

The ride took about an hour, most of which I spent zonked out. Toward the end I woke up and kept expecting the bus driver to tell us to get off because we seemed to be going all over the place and not toward where we needed to go. But in the end, just as he was turning around to re-do the route, he told us that this was it. He said, "It's just straight ahead, right down the road." I think that one of us asked how we'll know when we get there, then realized that it was a pretty stupid question. :-)

Walking toward Tantallon Castle

So we started off. It was a pleasant three or four mile walk, the first few miles of which I kept expecting to come around a bend and see the castle. But it's kind of hard to stumble across a castle especially when the road lies so close to the sea.

Tantallon is a very interesting castle because it's more of a lean-to than a complete castle. It's situated on a promentory that has a fairly narrow ground-level access to the mainland and has extreamly tall, extreamly steep and treacherous cliffs to the ocean on all of the other sides. So they just need one big wall to protect the whole thing.

Tantallon Castle and Dirleton Castle. Wrong restaraunt. Kindersurprise. Leaving crap at the bus stop.