Results tagged “Scotland” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Hello city lovers! Andy Hayes, author of the Edinburgh Walking Guides, takes us on a stroll through his favorite city.

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Edinburgh, Scotland is My City

The first place I take a visitor from out of town is a walk down the Royal Mile.  It's the heart of the city and where most of the popular attractions are.

When I crave fish and chips I always go to Bene's on the Royal Mile - if it's fit for royalty then it works for me.

To escape the city I head for the Water of Leith Walkway. It's 12 miles long but you can do any number of sections, or the whole thing if you feel like.

If I want to have good coffee I go to Artisan Roast.

For complete quiet, I can hide away with a stroll down the Innocent Railway Tunnel bike path. It's so easy to reach from the city centre, yet miles away from the world.

If you come to my city, get your picture taken with a bagpiper. I suppose it's just what is done.

If you have to order one thing off the menu from any pub it has to be haggis! Don't ask what it is, just try it.

Locals know to skip Princes Street and check out the boutiques on Cockburn Street as well as hidden alleyways across the city.

When I'm feeling cash-strapped I go for a nice pub meal. Greyfriars Bobbys Bar does a mean steak and ale pie.

Photo ops in my city include anywhere in Holyrood Park and the best vantage points are anywhere near the castle.

IT contributing writer Andrew Evans sends along this interview with his 97-year-old grandfather who vividly recalls his first transatlantic flight in 1949.
Not to boast, but in the last year I've crossed the Atlantic twelve times. In fact, I've done the 8-hour trip so many times, it's become rather routine: I doze during taxi and take-off, read until dinner, watch some movie I didn't want to pay for at home, then fall into fitful sleep before Greenland. Hopefully, I wake up somewhere over the English Channel. It's all so easy and yet still so amazing to me how every night, thousands of people pile into big metal pipes and wake up on the other side of the ocean.

In 1492, it took Christopher Columbus exactly 70 days to cross the same ocean and there was no SkyMall to pass the time. In 1776, tall sailing ships crossed the Atlantic in about 54 days and by the turn of the last century, steam-powered ocean liners crossed in about a week.

In 1912, just two months after the Titanic slipped beneath the icy North Atlantic waves, my grandfather Robert Brown Evans was born. Airplanes were just getting off the ground but by the time my grandfather was a teenager, Charles Lindbergh had made his famous flight from New York to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours.

As a paperboy supporting his widowed mother and three sisters, my grandfather never expected to travel outside his native Salt Lake City. But in 1929, when he was just 17 years old, he won an award for signing up the most new subscribers. His prize was a train trip to Seattle and a quick spin in a World War I biplane: "There was a single passenger seat in the front and a seat in back for the pilot, so they squeezed me and another boy up front. Right before we took off, the mechanics came and switched the propeller on the front of the plane, which of course, made me feel uneasy."

Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.

Every marriage has compromise.  Where to go when we had only limited time to explore Europe was just one of the challenges that put our marital conciliation to the test. When to discipline the kids; How to manage the budget; What to do about dinner. These were just some of our other points of contention . . . but I digress.  

"You only want to go because of the golf!" That was Carol's reaction when I first recommended including Scotland.  Truth be told, I am a golfer, but that's not solely why I suggested it. Come on! I figured the boys would get a thrill out of seeing where the Loch Ness Monster resides and that all the castles would be a source of unending fascination.

What ultimately persuaded my wife to acquiesce, however, was a personal invitation to stay in the home of our Bhutanese expedition leader we met back in October.  It seemed odd at first that a Scotsman would be the leader of a tour through the mountains of a Buddhist country, but it became obvious that few were better qualified than Richard Whitecross. The fact that he lives less than an hour outside Edinburgh ended up securing our ticket to Scotland.

Friend of IT Nathalie Jordi is just back from a jaunt to Edinburgh, where she was impressed by the city's foodie heritage. There's more than just haggis on the menu, for sure.

Edinburgh is a city more closely associated with hoary men in kilts, dimly lit medieval alleys and pub spillouts, a sort of Venice for Vikings, than it is with good food. But don't write the city off!  Behind the artfully arranged, artificially smoked slabs of factory-farmed salmon and piles of Walker's Shortbread boxes on the Golden Mile are a new generation of shopkeepers and restaurateurs who are busy presenting Edinburgh with the fruits of its own lands and those further.

Broughton Street is a good place to start. Immediately left is Crombie's, the most famous of Edinburgh's remarkable butcher shops, with several options for haggis--which, when properly done, is actually very good stuff. Buried in a basement storefront further up lies the excellent Villeneuve wine shop, with its carefully curated selection of single malts that come alive through impassioned soliloquies by the opinionated but sensitive merchants. Across the street sits Pani Solińska, a smart Polish delicatessen that offers its kielbasas and potato salads to those seeking the comforts of home as well as Scots eager to discover delights like the fleshy, pink Polish Parma ham, which probably violates multiple trademark laws but is absolutely delicious.   

For coffee, there's Artisan Roast; for fish, Something Fishy; for wheatgrass, Real Foods; and, for a potted history of where good food in Edinburgh began, there's Valvona and Crolla, an Italian delicatessen opened in 1934, a short hop over on Elm Row. Past the cavernous trove of cold-pressed olive oils, artisan cheeses and salumi is a sweet little café that serves some of the best Italian food in town.

Also on Broughton Street:  Edinburgh's Rapido Fish Bar, alleged home of the deep-fried Mars Bar.  O, terroir!  Some things are best on home turf, after all.

A few quick links from our travel radar this week...

- Now on display at the Testori UK Gallery in London: several works of art made from chewing gum. Artist Maurizio Sauvini used "American gum," as it's called in Rome, to shape a buffalo, bear, and a man. [Telegraph]

- Unleash your inner Viking at the Up Helly Aa Festival in Scotland's Shetland Islands, held the last weekend in January. [The Circumference]

- Treehugger points out that throwing trash out your car window creates the "finest All You Can Eat Buffet that Bambi has ever seen," which unfortunately is why so many animals are hit by cars. Stop roadkill by cleaning up your act. [Treehugger]

- Seattle Airport announces that it will begin using mobile air conditioning and heating units to keep planes cool while they're on the tarmac - reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the planes. [USA Today]

- We're all for safe cycling, so when we came across the Light Lane, which projects a laser bike lane on the ground surrounding the rider, we couldn't help think it brilliant. [Boing Boing]

Photo: via the Telegraph