Sept 15/11

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The day started off sunny and pretty cool. Today we travelled to St. Andrews and then to Edinburgh. At St Andrews we learned that the Scots put up St. Andrew’s church to show the cardinals in England that they were capable of having their own church separate from England. The church supposedly had some bones from one of the disciples, St. Andrew and in the day people would go on pilgrimages just to see this church and touch the casket holding the bones of St. Andrew. The church was enormous and very ornate. Later a man named John Knox gave a rousing speech at the local Presbyterian church denouncing the Catholic religion and how the bishops lived in opulence while the people were in poverty. This led to the whole town converting to Protestant and heading down the street to destroy St. Andrew’s church. Now it’s in ruins but enough stands to get an idea of how large it was. They also destroyed the Bishop’s palace but had a hard time getting in and had to dig a tunnel underneath the wall. The townsfolk sent men to dig a counter tunnel so it would collapse on the people trying to come in. We went down that tunnel and took some pics. We then toured through St. Andrew’s University, where Will met Kate. We took a couple of pics of the onsite church there. We had lunch at a baguette place and when we left a nice young man came out of the place carrying Vicki’s little purse, saying “ma’am you left this behind.” That was very lucky and says something about the students at St. Andrews.
Next it was on the road to Edinburgh. There we unloaded at the Carleton Barcelo and took off to do a Geocache that involved stuff along what they call the royal mile(the road that goes by the hotel and down to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where the Queen stays when she visits). We finally found all the clues but the actual cache was in a garden that closes in the evening. Vicki was disappointed that the clues didn’t have us seeing more important buildings in the area. We did see a couple of cool things though. A “close” is a small alleyway leading back behind the stores to the residences in behind. Some have cool little courtyards. Now we need a corkscrew.

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Photos

Counter Tunnel
Counter Tunnel at Biship's Palace