We're leaving for Glasgow today, but before we do it's time to get caught up on the last two days activities.

Wednesday we went on a bus tour of the Scottish borders and Rosslyn Chapel. Our first stop was in the middle of the woods where our guide told us about William Wallace while leading us to the oldest known statue of him (think Mel Gibson in Braveheart, only much taller).  

Next we briefly stopped in the tiny town of Melrose for lunch and a quick walk around. Melrose Abbey was also there to check out, but Amanda and I were satisfied with seeing it from a distance.

The guide stopped the bus at one particular spot on the hillside and we were able to get out and take some really nice photos of the countryside.  

* Side note: the yellow plants on the hills smell like coconut and are actually really thorny beneath the flowers.

Most of this tour was about the bus ride, looking out at the countryside while the guide relayed historical stories. Unfortunately a lot of this was lost as the guide spoke very quietly and not even the bus intercom system could help enough over the noises of the engine.

Our final stop was Rosslyn Chapel. We were not allowed to take pictures inside which was a real shame because there is so much to look at in a small space. We walked around the chapel analyzing each panel as if we were Tom Hanks in the Divinci code. There are little stands of information throughout the chapel to help you understand what you are looking at, but I usually left it up to Amanda to find the actual sections they were describing. We went into the crypt area, but I'm sad to report we didn't find any secret entrance anywhere :(

Thursday was a lazy day for us as the only thing planned was a ghost tour in the evening. We had the entire house to ourselves as the family we are staying with needed to leave for a funeral. We had both pizza and gin delivered and by the time we had to leave for our tour we were very much relaxed :D

The ghost tour was a walking tour where a group of about 20 of us set off into the streets of Edinburgh to hear old tales of people dying. Not many ghosts... more grusome tales.  

After a few stops we made our way to Greyfriars Kirkyard. It looks to be a smallish graveyard, but it houses some 200,000 inhabitants. It also may have been where JK Rowling got some of the names for Harry Potter. It really is a pretty graveyard, and as our tour plowed through it quite quickly we decided to go back once it was complete.

Our final location was an underground tunnel of sorts. Truthfully I don't know what the purpose of the tunnel is other than to tell ghost stories, but we listened attentively. We attempted to take a few pictures, but I'm sad to report that I don't believe we caught anything.

At the conclusion of our tour we headed back to the graveyard to try to locate Tom Riddles grave. With shouts of "stop cheating!" Amanda quicky investigated the back wall while I attempted to look up the location on my phone (she ended up finding it before I did). She also located McGonagal on our way out, very close to the gates of a private school people say was the inspiration for the house system at Hogwarts.

Let's see, what other Harry Potter sights have we seen here...

First there's the Balmoral where JK wrote some of Harry Potter:

We found her handprints in the streets of Edinburgh:

Also the elephant cafe where she often wrote:

We already talked about Alnwick Castle in a previous post... I'm sure I'm missing something, but we've managed to get to most of the locations. We're sitting here in the bus station almost ready to depart, perhaps JK herself will make an appearance *fingers crossed for Amanda*.