Sign in with Facebook
2 Stars - 59 Opinions
View towards National Gallery of Scotland
The Big Wheel
City centre spreads out to the West
St Giles Cathedral
My husband and I are going to be traveling to Edinburgh this summer. We will be leaving our four young children at home with a friend in Washington state (USA) and will need to be keeping in contact with them. I am trying to find out what would be the best (least expensive) way to call them. We will be staying at the Sheraton in Edinburgh. Are phone cards the best way to go? What phone card company would you recommend for this?
I tried emailing Sheraton for what they charged for the call and if they charged to use a phone card. They said I would have to contact the hotel directly and gave me the phone number, but I would prefer not to have to make the long distance call. Any imput would be appreciated.
Also, what good restaurants etc. are within walking distance of this hotel? Is it a long walk to catch one of those "hop-on hop-off" buses I read others talking about?
OK, just looked up where your hotel is, don't panic, unless you have a heart attack travelling, then it's only on Lothian Road opposite the Usher Hall.
As for phone calls, I'll let you look further into that but for tour and regular buses then they will be in easy distance. Give me a shout if you've any other concerns.
The link below has a cheap call service to the USA, you will be billed 2p higher than the cost of a local call. I have just called the Sheraton and they charge 40p per minute for a local call and £1.20 to a mobile phone.
http://www.firstnumber.co.uk/international-calls/cheap-calls-to-USA/
Hope that helps
Clive
Thank you so much for all of your help - especially going out of your way and calling the hotel! It seems that this forum has some very considerate people. I hope that somehow I will be able to repay the favor! What did you mean by not panicing about the location? Is that a bad part of town that I should be concerned about?
I think it just meant that it's not miles away from restaurants etc. You don't find Sheratons in 'bad' parts of town, so you can relax.
The Castle is the main attraction in Edinburgh and is a great way to spend a few hours. A city tour bus can be a good way of seeing the city but its pretty compact and can be seen on foot.
Princes Street is the main street with shops and pubs.
There's a lot of baoney talked about kilts and tartans. You'll see plenty of shops with ranks of clan ties and scarves for sale, each with their own family check and you can spend hours looking through lists of names to work out which one you should wear. It's a harmless game. Just don't take any of it too seriously.
Following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charlie raised a Highland army and nearly took the London government by surprise, all manner of plaid was banned from Scottish dress and anyone caught wearing it was thrown in jail or deported to Britainýs colonies. When tartan was subsequently rehabilitated and then made hugely popular, first with a grand visit of King George IV to Edinburgh, then with the frequent sojourns of Queen Victoria to her beloved Balmoral Castle, a whole fantasy world was invented around the checked cloth and the so-called ýnoble savagesý who wore it. Names were attached to tartans with little more science than the business of sticking pins blindly onto a page of patterns.
So in the end, just wear whichever tartan you fancy and don't worry too much about it's provenance.
The walk normally follows the river from belarno to Leith. We began our walk at Stockbridge and followed it to the Gallery of Modern Art.
The walk takes tou under the Dene, under Dean Bridge and Belford Bridge. On the way you pass St Bernard's well with the statue of Hygeaia, the restored Dean village houses, Miller's Row and the three grinding stones, as well as seeing the weirs that would have powered the mills.
The path is shaded by many different trees. The river has weirs, areas of duck weed like an Impressionist painting, bridges and we even saw a heron. It took a couple of hours but we were not hurrying as we had two small children with us.
When people think of hillwalking in Scotland, they almost always think of the Highlands. But there is a whole other area of hills, the Southern Uplands. As the name suggests, these are more in the way of rolling hills than craggy mountains, but can still make a useful getaway from the urban areas. The northern fringe of the Uplands is the Pentland Hills, just south of Edinburgh.
A substantial area of this forms the Pentland hills Regional Park: 10 000 acres of countryside, over 100km of paths.
Every town has its pubs and bars but Edinburgh has a proliferation of cool, nighttime walking tours which bring you up close and personal with the city's dark and macabre history...this City of the Dead tour was great, just make sure you wear heavy boots since you'll be tromping through a cemetery in the inky blackness and if the ground is mucky and muddy as it was that December evening...
Latest Edinburgh hotel reviews
Sponsored Links
Comments