Scotland: The Real Mary King's Close

Following our Harry Potter Trail tour in Scotland, we proceeded down the Royal Mile to The Real Mary King's Close for our next tour.  Yes, our first day in Scotland was a busy one, but a TON of fun!!!  The Real Mary King's Close is a tour that gives you a great view of 17th century Scotland and the means by which citizens of different economic classes lived.  For the poorer citizens, the living conditions were quite squalid.  The tour gave us a good view of the close (sort of an underground alleyway) and gave a great description of how homes in Edinburgh were built on top of each other due to lack of space.

Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures on this tour, but the image I pulled off the web below gives a good view of what we saw.

There are so many tours you can do in Scotland that it's impossible to hit all of them, but The Real Mary King's Close is an excellent tour I highly recommend if you have the time.  The tour guide did an excellent job and mixed in the perfect dose of humor to make this not only an educational tour but a fun tour as well!  

My only complaint is the online booking process.  You have to book early and if you are only in Edinburgh for a day or two as we were, you don't have the option of booking onsite.  When booking online, our booking kept failing.  After checking that my credit card wasn't being declined, I learned that the likely culprit is the tour I was trying to book was full, so the payment wasn't being processed.  The time of the tour online showed as being open, but I did get a message that one reason my payment was canceled was possibility due to an already booked tour.  In other words, the website was not keeping up with which tours were open/closed.  I kept trying to book a closed tour even though the website said it was an open tour.  Aside from that, this was an excellent tour.