With my aunt, cousin, and mom, I boarded the train from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. The ride lasted just a few hours and was scenic. We traveled past cute villages, the shore, and more rolling green hills with low stone walls and sheep (or cattle!) than you can imagine.
In Edinburgh, we planned to see more recent family history but we made a quick detour through the Royal Botanic Garden first.
From the garden, we walked to the home of my paternal great-grandparents. When my mom and aunt were kids, they came with their parents to Scotland once and stayed here. I've heard my mom and aunt tell stories from that trip: how the front garden was so massive; the phone booth was incredibly far from the house; the field across the street was so big, it took forever to run across. They had to laugh at their own childhood impressions: the front garden was about four paces deep and four paces wide; the phone booth was just on the corner, one house away; the field was no bigger than a soccer pitch. Still, it was great to see where my grandpa grew up and watch my aunt and mom reminisce.
It was a good long walk, but we made it to my grandma's house. The weather had been surprisingly cooperative thus far, which meant that the clouds absolutely hammered us with rain as we approached the house. While we had lingered at my grandpa's house, here we snapped a quick photo and looked for the nearest taxi. We were totally drenched and, more importantly, my mom and aunt hadn't spent any time here on their childhood trip to Scotland. It was more to put a place with the stories their mother had told them.
Predictably, the downpour stopped just moments before we got in the taxi. We returned to our hotel to change into dry clothes. We were staying at The Scotsman, a gorgeous hotel that had been a newspaper office during my grandparents' youth. My grandma had worked here in the telegraph office during WWII so to us this felt like a more important landmark in her life than her house.
That night we went on the City of the Dead walking tour of town where we got a quick overview of the city's history before entering the underground tunnels once populated by Edinburgh's homeless. It was pitch black down there and the dripping water echoed off the stone walls, making it the perfect place for a few choice ghost stories. Most famous is the South Bridge Entity who leaves a calling card in the form of three equally spaced scratches on your body. We survived unscathed (although for the rest of the night my aunt referred to the South Bridge Entity as the South Beach Entity, making me picture a dieter who has finally snapped) and emerged to find Edinburgh shroud in the thickest fog I've ever seen in a city.
