We didn't have much planned for our last day, Sunday, except for a tour of
HMY Britannia. In lay people terms, that's the Queen's yacht that she took whenever going by sea. It was retired from use in '97 and now it's just docked for tours and the occasional get together for the royal fam. For it's only main purpose being to transport the Queen places, it's a pretty ridiculously huge ship. The Queen certainly has a royal posse like no other.
I think there were 5 floors that we were allowed to tour but I don't know if that was all the floors. Regardless, it a big ship.
The tour was actually a self-guided audio tour with the audio things looking like they were straight out of the 90's. Which, they probably were. I was probably the only one that actually listened to the audio thing most of the time considering I often found myself behind everyone scrambling to catch up and find people.
The yacht is actually ridiculous in the sheer amount of opulence that's on it and associated with it. They said they used to set up a swimming pool on the royal poop deck if the Queen or anyone wanted to go for a swim:
It's probably not actually called the royal poop deck but I'm just going to ignore that.
We saw this and were wondering for the longest time what the R was in the Queen's seal since it was one everything. Being the nerd I am, I looked it up as soon as I got back to Cork and it actually stands for "Regina" which means queen in Latin. Because you really couldn't have just put Queen Elizabeth.
And really, her name or "The Queen" is really plastered all over everything on the yacht.
Which I guess makes sense considering it's technically her boat.
I also was kind of expecting a lot of the rooms to be a lot smaller considering space is prime on boats in general. Some of them were positively Titanic in how big they were.
Their sitting room which is probably the size of the entire first floor of my house. They also have a nicer piano than I do at my house...jealous. At least we don't need to bolt our to the floor so it doesn't slide around our living room.
Another gigantic room was the dining room:
See now THIS is the size table we need for Baumann family functions. Then certain someones wouldn't need to be pushed to the "kids" table....again.
I also like how they folded their napkins in the shape of pope's hats:
All around the walls they had gifts and possessions displayed, and I got unacceptably excited when seeing this:
The item in question is at the very right. IT WAS A NARWHAL HORN.
My honest to god first thought upon seeing it was "oh my god...it's a unicorn horn! they ARE real!" But I guess a narwhal is kind of like the unicorn of the sea so it totally does count as a unicorn horn in my book.
Turns out later on that the space the royal family has is made up for in the space the crew does
not have:
It's like summer camp all over again! Maybe it's because when the Queen was traveling she could sometimes take up to 5 tons of luggage. I don't think I
own 5 tons of anything let alone luggage.
I mean, whenever travelling it's always important to bring the royal beer bong along:
I wish. This was actually in the crew's lounge room so the Queen probably wasn't shooting any beers back with this.
They did have some hands on stuff to keep the kids entertained and for once it wasn't me running to touch everything:
And as much as I poke fun at it, the whole thing was pretty cool. Once we were done we ate lunch in the huge mall that we had to walk through in order to get to the yacht in the first place. Then we were off to the airport back to Cork.
We got there around 2:30 as our flight was scheduled for 4:50. Just our luck though (or lack thereof), our flight was delayed 4 hours because of bad weather in Ireland. So now instead of wasting away for 2 hours in the airport, we got to waste away for 6. It brought back some not so good memories of when I once spent an entire day at the airport on the wait list trying to get a flightl. Thankfully, Aer Lingus was a bit more compassionate about our situation and gave us a meal voucher to use in the terminal.
This actually worked out perfectly because during our entire time in Scotland, we had yet to try haggis. Go ahead and make your disgusted faces, but I was truly curious even if it did have less savory sheep parts in it. Christine and I in particular were excited that we had one last chance to hunt it down. Eventually we found a restaurant in the terminal that served it. It was on the menu as "haggis, neeps, and tatties"which we finally figured out meant turnips and potatoes as side dishes. I got the whole she-bang despite not really caring for turnips all that much but I figured there was going to be weirder thing on the plate.
And of course someone had to snap a picture of my first bite:
It actually was pretty tasty and I would get it again. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised because the Scots wouldn't keep eating something if it was gross. Haggis actually has a lot of grains and spices mixed in with it so that's probably what made it
stomach-able. Hardy har har I made a funny. But as you can probably see, our haggis wasn't encased in anything so it just kind of looked like the insides of a sausage. I even at the turnips which weren't as bad as I had anticipated either. It was a dish full of surprises.
After that we finally, finally, finally were able to leave for Cork. The flight back was the slightest bit better concerning my ears and being sick, but I'd still rather to never fly sick ever again. It was a great weekend and I would highly recommend a trip to Edinburgh for anyone who might be in the area in the future! And haggis. Try the haggis.
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