Day 8: Glamis Castle and St. Andrews

 Shocker, but we were up and out of the house early this morning!  We headed out to Glamis Castle in Forfar. It was the child hood home of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret was born there.   The Bowes-Lyons family still reside there so no pictures allowed inside but this tour was worth the stop!

This is what you see driving up

At the end of the tour there’s a room of artifacts you can take pictures of 

The place for the owls

They use the main kitchen as the restaurant. 

After, we headed to St. Andrews.  Traffic there was pretty bad but we finally found a place to park and walked over to the Martyr’s Monument to meet our tour guide Kate. 

The beach is where they filmed the scene from Chariots of Fire. 

The 18th hole at St.Andrews

The most expensive f-you ever. When a man named Hamilton was not granted membership to the club, he built this building to overshadow it. The penthouse is the best view of the course when the stands are up for the tournament. St. Andrews didn’t allow women until 2014 and that is only because the head of the college is always granted admission and that was the first year a woman was dean.  They are overhauling the club to accommodate women now. 

We then walked over towards the school, starting with the deans house. 

Patrick Hamilton was burned at the stake   His initials are in the stones. It’s said if you step in them you’ll be cursed with bad luck.  He also is said to appear in a brick in the face of the building. 

All 3 of us took a picture of this street…we are children…

Where Will and Kate met. 

St. Andrew’s Castle

The local outdoor swimming pool

The remains of St. Andrew’s catherdral

The Wishing Door.  Touch the top as you walk through and make your wish!

We ended with Hamish McHamish (find his story here:https://vimeo.com/665640269 )

Once we finished the tour, we were off to Edinburgh. We found our AirBNB, dropped the bags then went and dropped off Nessie. 

 

On the walk back we saw this…unsure how this kid had their car repo’ed…

They must have heard we were coming because we noticed heightened security while we were having dinner (it couldn’t be because the Military Tattoo is happening or the fringe!). Either way, they have the cutest security dog!

We’ll be up there tomorrow!

So the only sour note is our AirBNB.  The host emailed Krissy maybe 2 hours before we got here to say the curtain near the sofa bed was down so she left an eye mask for whomever had to sleep there.  When we came in we found:

1. The drain in the sink is broken and there was dirty water in it

2. The sofa bed wasn’t made and there are no sheets for it. 

3. We’re resourceful so we found a duvet cover and thought we’d wrap the mattress in that but it had blood on it (so we put it in the washer which, if you’ve been to Europe, you know the washing cycle alone takes close to 3 hours). 

4.  They didn’t leave enough towels for all of us. 

The hosts response to all of this was pull out the drain stopper and she’d send the maid by tomorrow with sheets and towels. That’s doesn’t really help tonight though.  We did, however, kind of solve the curtain issue:

Sadly we paid for this place because the balcony overlooks the castle and we thought we’d chill on the balcony listening to the tattoo tonight but, since we managed to get this to stay up, we’re afraid to take it down    Oh well, we can still here the tattoo inside and I just saw part of the fireworks.  We’ll have awesome seats tomorrow!