Long walks, day two

I've been meaning to visit Edinburgh's excuse for a beach for months now, but standing by the sea in the dead of winter is hardly my idea of fun. Today was beautiful, though cool and breezy, and I decided that now would be as good a time as any.

The problem, then, was how to get to the Firth, and finding the part of it accessible to pedestrians. My handy book of Edinburgh maps suggested that the route would be simple enough - basically, head east and hope for the best - so I packed my camera and headed for the park.

The simplest route would have been to cross Princes Street to the Omni Centre and keep on going, but I wanted to take some pictures of the heather in the park, so I went the long way around and eventually exited near the palace. What followed was an hour or so of walking through an area I think was Portobello, seeing more of what I've come to think of as inner city Edinburgh - in other words, there were no cows today. I did like the Craigmillar cows.

Eventually, once past the crematorium (I said I took the long route...), I reached the Firth and the public swimming area, and descended to the beach. There are a few things I can say about the Firth of Forth: there's quite a difference between tides, the water is fairly brown close to the shore, and the beach is freezing. Everyone I saw - the couple with the dogs, the old man digging for shellfish against the signs' instructions - was dressed warmly against the wind, except for one poor fool, who I last saw heading for the water with his tennis shoes in his hand. Look, I'm all for sticking my feet in strange bodies of water, but if I'm on the beach in a North Face jacket, there's no way I'm sloughing off the shoes for anything less than polar waters. Uh-unh. I did get a souvenir seashell, though.

I had been noticing all along that my route was closely following that of the 12 bus, so, having planned ahead today, I was able to secure passage back to Princes Street and save myself the three-mile hike into the city center. One mile from Princes Street is far better than three from the beach.

In a totally unrelated note, I'm making friends with the morning security guard at Tesco. Since my purse or my iPod sets off the detectors almost every time I enter or leave the store (and that Tesco is the only one at which this happens!), the guard and I have gotten to be on quasi-familiar terms. This morning, he asked me where I'd been, since he hadn't heard the door alarm in a few days. Nice to be missed. He then went on to tell me that he's from Malawi and has a Criminology degree, and he's deciding what to do with it. That's two criminologists at grocery stores, now - I'm thinking there must be some sort of union...