HMV Brittania - Wednesday

Today we had lots of ideas, but as usual the weather managed to get in the way of it.

We headed out about 10:00 to catch the hop on hop off bus that would take us beyond the centre of Edinburgh, which we’d walked yesterday. 

The bus headed down through the outer parts of the New Town to the Firth of Forth and the harbour to where the HMV Britannia is docked and then back through some of the eastern parts of Edinburgh before it arrived back in town. We passed through lots of beautiful areas with some lovely old homes, past the Botanic Gardens and other historic areas. 

We had a chuckle at this ad on the back of a bus going to the zoo:

And there is a sad lack of maintenance occasionally, combined with some very haphazard wiring. As well as this example , I saw a poor electrician testing random cables appearing out of a wall trying to make sure he didn’t electrocute himself.

Once we’d done that, we thought we’d actually head back to the HMV Britannia, which was the Queen's private yacht. 

It was a really interesting tour and clearly showed the disparity between the haves, being the Queen and her guests  and they have not - the poor bunnies running around in the bowels of the boat serving her and making sure the thing moved forward. The boat was actually captained by a Commodore but under the control of an Admiral. 

Officers dining room:

Some of the biggest suites I think we’ll ever see in a ship, including the bedrooms, drawing rooms, studies and the dining room that made up the Queens quarters - it was all pretty impressive and very spacious.

Queen's bedroom:

Prince Phillip's bedroom:

Need a drink (including Brittania Gin)?

And of course it came with all the cutlery and silverware, monogrammed crockery and glassware, etc you’d expect from a royal residence. 

Formal Dining Room:

It’s a beautiful old boat built in 1953 and decommissioned in the 90s and the engine room itself was a pristine mass of gleaming chrome, brass and white paint. 

It was a fascinating tour and one of the many interesting things for me was that Prince Phillip once owned a Flying 15,  which is a boat that dad and I used to sail when I was a kid, so I know it well.

As per usual, as we exited the Britannia the heavens had opened and it was pouring with rain so we hopped into the local food court grab some lunch before catching on the bus to get us back into central Edinburgh. By this time it was probably heading towards 3:30 in the afternoon and although we had intended to head towards Hollyrood Park and Arthurs Seat (not necessarily climbing all the way, but to have a look) the weather was not the sort of weather that I was going to bother doing that in, so we headed to the Scottish National Gallery for some inside touring. We explored some of the old paintings that the gallery has in its collection. 

Unfortunately for some reason about 2/3 of the gallery wasn’t open, but we got to see a lot of the old masters from the 1500s through to the late 1800s. But there was no modern art available to view, so it was a bit limited unfortunately. 

By this time it was about 5:00 so we thought we’d head home via Sainsbury’s and picked up some chicken for dinner along with some salad. Given we had three flights of stairs to climb, we thought we needed some extra fortitude for that, so we dropped into our Thistle Street Bar and had a couple of quiet ones before we headed up the stairs.

We had a really nice baked chicken with salad and roast potatoes and a bottle of shiraz for dinner - all for a fraction of eating out.

Today just reminded us how impressive inner Edinburgh is. I wasn’t so impressed with some of the outer areas we came through on the tram from the airport, but generally the inner parts of Edinburgh are absolutely spectacular and really worth seeing. 

Tomorrow we pick up our car and we head up towards the Highlands of Scotland, so it'll be interesting to see what we find there. Unfortunately the weathers looks like it’s going to be quite interesting - we’ve got 75 mile an hour winds forecast left over from from a cyclone that’s headed across the Atlantic from America, along with heavy rain tonight. 

It's supposed to be clear (but windy) tomorrow but then more rain snd storms for the weekend, so we’ll see how we go.

Cheers