EDINBURGH

My main goal for 2018 is to travel more. So I started January off with a trip to Edinburgh with Dom. We found a cute Airbnb in Leith just outside of Edinburgh centre which was a short taxi ride away. We only booked about a week in advance and got some good deals on flights. As I live in the midlands the flight was super short – only 45 minutes and a lot of people asked why didn’t I drive but honestly I think I would have fallen asleep at the wheel. It was our first flight on our own together as when we went to Alicante we flew with my family. The flight was pretty easy apart from my suitcase being completely emptied and searched for what felt like no reason.

When we arrived in our Airbnb we loved it so much we were quite happy staying in so we watched a little tv snuggled up on the comfy sofa with a cup of tea for an hour or so and then headed out to find somewhere to eat, it was still quite early so we did a little pub crawl and explored Leith. We found some really quirky bars and ate in a lovely restaurant called The Granary. After we got some alcohol from the local Sainsbury’s and headed back to the flat to watch the first Star Wars in our matching pj’s (20 year olds going on 40?).

We only had 2 nights there, one half day and one full day so I wanted to make sure we made the use of our time. I asked for recommendations on Twitter which is where I was told about Camera Obscura, it’s £15 per person but definitely worth it, we spent nearly 2 hours in there. You can see Edinburgh castle from Camera Obscura so we had a little wander around after and snapped a few photos. Something we would have loved to do is visited the zoo as it’s the only zoo in the UK with red pandas but it’s quite far out of the city centre and we ran out of time. We visited the City Art Centre instead which is free entry and theres about 5 floors of exhibitions. That evening we ate at Bella Italia and made the walk from Edinburgh to Leith instead of getting a taxi which we thought was a lot further than it actually was. We stopped off in a couple of pubs on the way before heading back to our Airbnb.

Edinburgh is as gorgeous as it looks and I’ll be visiting again in the near future to see the red pandas! It’s such a lovely city, somewhere that felted homely and safe. If you haven’t visited you should definitely add it to your travel list.