After our short visit to London, we headed north to start the Scottish portion of our United Kingdom trip. After our debacle with Ryanair in Portugal last year, I have been hesitant to fly on budget European airlines with a baby, so we decided to take the train from London to Edinburgh, which was much more relaxing and pleasant.
We booked our train tickets on LNER in advance so were able to get them for a reasonable price, less than it would cost us to fly even on a budget airline. We departed from Kings Cross Station in London and it took 4.5 hours to get to Edinburgh Waverley Station. We had brief difficulty with a cranky Teddy but fortunately he eventually fell asleep for a long nap on the last half of our journey.
We arrived in Edinburgh in early afternoon, and took a black cab to our hotel Wilde Aparthotels Grassmarket. This was another apartment-style hotel with a full kitchen and laundry facilities. It wasn’t quite as nice as the hotel in London but was optimally located right beside Edinburgh Castle within Old Town, so we were able to walk everywhere during our time in the city.
Our first couple days in Edinburgh were spent navigating intense crowds as we had arrived right at the tail end of festival season. In August, thousands of visitors descend upon Edinburgh for the multitude of events including the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo and Festival Fringe, both of which we had the chance to attend.
We attended the earlier evening show of the Military Tattoo that took place outside Edinburgh Castle. The tickets were quite pricey so we only purchased two seats and had Teddy sit on our laps. The show was about 90 minutes long, and surprisingly Teddy watched it attentively until the last 10 minutes when they were doing a tribute to a community volunteer. 🤦🏻♀️ We did see other children at the show but he was the youngest one there, as far as I could tell.
The next day, we had tickets to a more toddler appropriate show at Festival Fringe – The Amazing Bubble Man, which was entertaining even for the adults!
Our time in Edinburgh landed on Teddy’s 2nd birthday, so we took him to Princes Street Playground to celebrate another trip around the sun.
We had a few good meals in Edinburgh. Highlights for me included our Sunday Roast at The Queens Arms.
And bangers and mash at Makar’s Mash Bar.
After our couple days experiencing festival season in Edinburgh, we moved on to a trip outside the city to explore the Highlands. I’ll share about that next!
I've Bean Travelling 
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