My heart belongs to Scotland

If only I could marry a Scot, ay! Scotland might be the most beautiful place my eyes have ever seen. But "beautiful" seems so unappreciative of the indescribable land I have just encountered. Breathtaking, majestic, incredible, awesome, brilliant, amazing, splendorous, unreal, GREEN...some of the words that rolled through my head as our bus scooted across the country from loch to loch and mountain to mountain. I wish I could describe what it looked like and I wish my pictures did it justice, but no...there is just nothing to say or show for it...it has to be viewed by your own eyes to fully understand.
We left for Scotland Thursday morning (july7)-had to rise at 4 a.m. to be at Megen's for 5 to go to the airport! Edinburgh was pretty sunny and warm when we got there so we walked down the Royal Mile, which is the historic high street of Edinburgh. At the top is Edinburgh castle and at the bottom is Holyrood house, which is the official Scottish residence of the Royal family. If you choose to continue past Holyrood house and to the right, you will reach this huge "park"-Holyrood Park- and there is this massive hill. At the top of the hill is Arthur's Seat. It's quite a little hike up there, but Meg and I took it on and got some great views of the city and the sea. After that we went to the cutest little tea room for cakes and iced coffee! During the afternoon sometime we got the news about the attacks in London. It was pretty crazy and strange because we know so many people in London...just weird...so we watched the news for a while and contacted a couple of people in London to make sure they were fine. Then, that night we went out to a pub-The Malt Shovel-for some local Scottish music. We had a crackin' good time.
The next 3 days we were on the Scotland/Isle of Skye tour all over the place! Saw incredible sights, the true Scotland-outside of the city. We stopped in precious little towns, lunched at a loch, took a boat ride on Loch Ness, heard loads of legends, went to Saucy Mary's pub in Kyleakin for some more live music-all on Friday. Saturday we went on a seal cruise and saw lots of seals and lots of jellyfish-who knew there were jellyfish up there?? Went to Portree-the Isle of Skye "capital," fairyland which is my favorite place in the world, hiked on a mountainside in the rain-I got scared of the heights and this nice boy Simon offered to hold my hand so that I could make it up :-), had to hold Meg's hand on the way down. Sunday we took the ferry from Skye to mainland Scotland, went to the beach and got some shells, grabbed lunch for a picnic and then ate next to a river at Glen Nevis (bottom of Ben Nevis which is the highest mountain in the UK) where some of Braveheart was filmed, on to glencoe overlook with beautiful waterfall/river views, to another waterfull near a town called Callander, saw a hairy coo named Hamish...and ended up back in Edinburgh that evening. We went to this awesome African restaurant called NDEBELE. I love African food! The next day we bought the souveniers we had previously picked out and since it was the most beautiful day ever!!! we grabbed food from a supermarket and picnicked in the park for lunch. Then we ended up spending the rest of the afternoon laying out in the park reading...and also had a picnic dinner there as well! It was a great day under the sun and I read a book called Purple Hibiscus-which is by a Nigerian author and takes place in Nigeria-really good story. Then we flew back to London and our wonderful holiday was sadly finished.