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The Hub’s passport was full, each page suffering travel stampage overload. So I dropped him at the American Consulate in Edinburgh. “Wait,” said the nice lady at the door. “He needs a special delivery envelope to send off the passport.”

Armed with detailed directions—”Straight off down Regent Road, ten minutes walk, easy-peasy.”—the dog and I set off.

And it would have been easy, not to mention peasy, if Scotland hadn’t decided to hold Spring that day. We were distracted by a billion daffodils.

And by the “New” Parliament House (which actually never was, and which locals still call the Old Royal High School)

Then there was the Duke of Wellington on his famous horse Copenhagen outside Register House.

Oooh and Old Calton Cemetery, with its graves of famous dead A-listers, giant obelisk memorial to early martyrs for universal suffrage and…

Yes, that’s Abe Lincoln and a freed slave on the Emancipation Monument in honor of Scottish Americans who fought in the American Civil War. I couldn’t make this up. [This isn’t my image because I couldn’t get close enough. The monument was surrounded by an entire busload of confused-looking Japanese tourists. So this image is from Wikimedia Commons here]

And of course, the fabulously over the top Art Deco St. Andrews Building, the Scottish Government HQ.

But really, we would STILL have made it if it wasn’t for…

The Sir Walter Scott Memorial, the tallest writer monument in the world. How could a writer resist?

After that, the only thing left to do was to head down into Princes Street Gardens, under the watchful walls of Edinburgh Castle.

We would probably still be walking if the Consulate hadn’t called to see if we’d had trouble with our easy-peasying…