Edinburgh Days 25-27 (8/22-24)

Today was another very quiet day. Aside from another quick gym trip in the morning, I basically sat in my room, relaxing and recovering, and letting myself be a little sad that the Over Her Dead Body portion of the trip was really over.

I did ultimately get myself moving to meet a handful of folks at Sandy Bell’s pub, where our fiddler and mandolin player were sitting in with a bluegrass jam they have on Thursday evenings. I walked to the pub from the actor house, over Calton Hill (though not *quite* to the top) and arrived a bit early for the 9pm session. The place was already pretty packed, and it only got more so as the night went on. There was a solid mix of both locals and tourists there to check out the World Famous Bluegrass joint. There were also several musicians we had met before at the jam at Brewer’s Rest earlier in the week, plus this session has a musician playing a washboard (!) as well as someone with a euphonium (!!).

Sadly, the crowd was a bit too big and too loud to hear the music well from where we were able to find space, but overall we had a lot of fun.

As we were gathering ourselves to leave, Jo, who runs the booking of acts at the pub, asked us if we might be free to come play again as a group, and offered us 100 pounds to do 3 hours. We agreed to play again on Sunday afternoon, which will be a nice button on the end of the trip for us, I think.

On the way home, we got to say hi to Greyfriars Bobby 😍

Today (8/23) was for finishing tasks to get us cleared out from the venue. A crew of us met at Greenside at 10am to grab the remaining set pieces from the show and load them out to be donated at a charity shop we had coordinated with in Leith. With 6 of us it was pretty quick to grab the last chairs and tables (and rug…), and hop into a couple of Uber XLs for the ride down The Walk.

When we arrived at the charity shop we learned that while they would take the chairs and table, they would not accept the rug we had used. We left the furniture there, and attempted to donate the rug at several other nearby places, though apparently it is common policy not to accept rugs and upholstery, so we weren’t able to find a place to donate it. Sadly, that meant it went into the bin.

As it was still morning, we all walked back towards the actor flat to have a coffee at a cute place on Easter Road called Little Fitzroy. We found that Little Fitzroy was the name of the take-away side of the coffee shop, but right next door they had Little Sitzroy (😂), where they had table service and seating.

Once we finished coffee and split up to our individual days, I popped into the gym for the days work out (and got to meet the owner, who thanked me for helping out the guy who got injured a few days prior). Then it was back to the flat to chill and play some music in preparation for the Sandy Bell’s gig we had later in the weekend.

That evening the house went out to dinner together at the Lioness of Leith, an eclectic pub some of us had been to early in the trip and really enjoyed, and celebrated our final night as a ‘full house’ at the flat, since after tonight folks would start departing for other vacations and home over the next few days.

Now, it’s August 24th and Kari arrives today!

I got up and out of the house to head to the airport on the tram to meet her flight and escort her back into town. Her flights all landed on time, so after a short wait for baggage, we were back on the tram and making our way to Edinburgh and the actor flat. We quickly dropped our stuff off in my room there, then headed right out to meet a bunch of folks at the Port of Leith distillery for a tour and tasting there.

The building is new and pretty impressive, apparently the largest ‘vertical’ distillery in Europe, and situated in the port it has some great views both back up into Edinburgh as well as over the Firth of Forth. We got to enjoy those views through typically Scottish weather (from the inside, thankfully) listening to pounding rain and fierce wind as we toured, and then with clear and sunny skies by the time we were in the tasting room enjoying some of their spirits.

After the tasting we made our way back to the actor house to pack up both my and Kari’s luggage so we could carry it over to the AirBnB flat we’d be spending the next few days in Edinburgh in. We walked the thankfully few short blocks from the actor house and got settled in before heading out again into Old Town to watch the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. We (and about 9 thousand other folks!) had a great time (if pretty chilly) watching over 800 cast members of their show “Journeys”. It was pretty epic and impressive in many ways, not the least the immense scale of the enterprise.

We left the Tattoo energized but a bit cold (the wind was wicked the entire show) so we hustled back into town where we sat in the cozy wine bar I had found earlier in the trip, Nótt. We warmed up and had some wine and a delicious charcuterie board before heading back to our flat and turning in relatively early. Tomorrow we had the Castle tour on the agenda, as well as our farewell set at Sandy Bell’s!