Edinburgh With Young Kids: Four Days, What We Did, and What We Skipped

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Edinburgh was the first place on our trip where I watched my kids figure out a city faster than I did.

We came up by train from the Peak District in late October, straight from a farm into one of the busiest cities in Britain. I was not ready for it. They were, eventually.

This is what four days there looked like with a three and four year old, including the things we never got to.

Right below Edinburgh Castle, in West Princes Street Gardens, there's a fenced playground next to the Ross Fountain. You're standing in a sandpit and the castle is sitting on the rock directly above you.

I think about that playground all the time.

On our first visit the girls climbed to the top of the play structure and got stuck. They wouldn't go down the slide and they couldn't work out how to get back down the way they came.

Admittedly, it was scary for me too.

Then some bigger kids came over and asked if they could help. And they just did. Walked my daughters through it like it was their job.

Within about ten minutes the girls had settled in completely and were playing with kids they didn't share a language with. There were families there from all over the world, and nobody needed any of it explained.

We go to playgrounds constantly. Back home we went several times a week, and if I'm being honest, kids mostly didn't play with strangers. Families kept to themselves. I don't think that's anybody's fault exactly; I think when a whole country gets a bit wary of its neighbors, the kids pick it up too.

This was different. This was how I'd always assumed a playground was supposed to work.

We went back a few more times. The girls still bring it up.

We booked an Airbnb, and out of every place we booked on this trip, this was the one I was most excited for. Maximalist, packed with antiques, like a dealer lived there and kept all their favorite things.

It photographed better than it was in person. Still lovely, just a bit more shabby than chic.

The brand new walk-in shower had no handrail and was genuinely slippery, which with small kids is not ideal. Thankfully there was a bathtub, so we just sat them in that.

Then there was the window.

Outside our bedroom, and the girls' bedroom, there was a flat bit of roof. It turned out the neighbors used it as their patio. On Friday and Saturday night they were out there drinking, right outside our windows, and the shutters didn't close all the way.

I felt like an animal in a zoo.

I'm sure a group of young people enjoying their weekend was not that interested in a family of four lying in bed. But the next morning we'd look out and see beer cans on the roof, and that was the moment it clicked how they got there.

If you're booking anywhere old and central, it's worth asking what's outside the bedroom windows.

I never felt unsafe in Edinburgh. Not once.

For a city that size, with that much international attention, I genuinely didn't feel like I had to watch my kids the way I would in a comparable American city.

The only real hazard was other tourists. Edinburgh is a city where everybody walks around looking upward, at the Scott Monument, at the spires, at the whole skyline. Which I understand completely. I spent years running a gutter company, so I was looking up too (though mostly at the gutters, which are phenomenal).

The problem is nobody's looking at the people around them. I got bumped into a lot. The girls nearly got flattened a few times, never by anybody being careless on purpose, just by somebody backing up for a photo.

So we kept hands held in the busy parts, more than we did anywhere else in Britain.

The other thing that was new for us was the drinking culture. We stayed near a few bars, and you could hear it at night, and some mornings there'd be broken glass on the street around the corner. Neither of us drinks much (I don't drink at all), and I think that's partly why we noticed. In the States drinking tends to happen in specific places, college towns, festivals. Here it's just part of a city's evening. I suspect most Europeans wouldn't even register it.

We went October 21st to 25th, which is shoulder season. Busy, but manageable. I've seen photos from summer and Christmas and I'd think hard about going with small kids at those times.

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If you do one thing in Edinburgh with kids, do this.

The Royal Yacht Britannia is moored out in Leith, and it was both of our favorite experiences in all of Scotland. We didn't plan to pick the same thing. We just did.

My favorite part happened before we'd even boarded.

The man at the front pulled out a wand. I stuck my arms straight out, because I assumed I was getting checked with a metal detector.

He turned it on. It was the audio guide.

Rebecca leaned over and said, "Put your arms down. He's not wanding you. You're not in the United States anymore."

I think about that moment more than almost anything else from the trip. Then they gave us a corgi sticker.

Rebecca has always loved Britain and the royal family, and she cried for a good part of the visit. She knew how much that ship meant to Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, how it was a place where they found peace together, and being on it, seeing their rooms and their photographs, she felt close to that. I think her being so moved set the tone for all of us. Even the girls seemed to understand they were somewhere that mattered.

It isn't built for kids, exactly, but they loved it. There's a corgi scavenger hunt throughout the ship, which kept them going the whole way through, and you get to see every part of the boat.

And then lunch. Soup, sandwiches, cream tea. Honestly some of the best food we had anywhere on the whole trip, and very reasonably priced for where you're eating it.

Rebecca kept that corgi sticker on her water bottle for months. Then she lost the water bottle in Greece. She is still more upset about the sticker.

You can book Royal Yacht Britannia tickets here.

If you're a tourist and you're not sure where to start, the hop-on hop-off bus is the best way to see Edinburgh. I'd say that about most cities.

Your ticket usually covers a day or two, so you can treat it as your public transport. Regular city lines go to one place or another. This one goes to all the places a visitor actually wants.

It's also how we got out to the Britannia. On the ride to Leith we passed schools and neighborhoods and kids out playing, and we got to see where people in Edinburgh actually live. Leith felt calmer, a real neighborhood with community things going on and easy bus access to the center. If we go back, that's where I'd want to stay.

A warning about the commentary. Out of every city tour we listened to across Britain, Edinburgh's was the most gruesome. Body snatching, bodies sold to medical schools, the works. We spent a good portion of it hoping the kids' version was saying something different. (They mostly couldn't hear it anyway, and kept telling us so.)

Edinburgh and York had the spookiest feel of anywhere we visited. Not in a bad way. You just feel the weight of a lot of history there.

One more thing about the buses. Our girls saw their first double-decker in Edinburgh, walking down to the Co-op, and I happened to catch it on film. "There it is! It's a double-decker bus!" From then on, even for a ten minute ride, they'd beg to sit up top at the front.

Book the Edinburgh hop-on hop-off bus here.

Tamil Teru on Rose Street was some of the best Indian food we had anywhere. It's South Indian, which was new to us. Back home we mostly knew the naan-and-curry version; this was paratha and completely different flavors. We ate in once and came back for takeaway. The girls are still developing a taste for it, but we were sold.

Right outside is a Bird & Blend tea shop, which is how I discovered them, so that corner of Edinburgh has a lot to answer for.

Then there was breakfast at Côte, and a waiter named Callum.

Callum was amazing. He asked the girls what they wanted and let them order their OWN meals directly from him, including juice refills, which we technically did not authorize. (We paid for them. Fair enough.)

At the end he gave me his number and said that when we come back, he'll take me golfing.

I've thought about that a lot since. It's such a small thing to offer a stranger.

Dynamic Earth. Do as little research as possible before you go. Just know it's designed for children and takes two to three hours. We walked in with no idea what it was and loved it, the same way we did with Wake the Tiger in Bristol. Some things are better unexplained.

National Museum of Scotland. Enormous. We spent the better part of a day there, ate lunch there, and didn't see a quarter of it. Very welcoming to kids, and they were wiped out by the end in the good way.

Holyroodhouse. Worth it. A good one to pair with the bus.

We didn't go inside Edinburgh Castle. We barely touched the Royal Mile. We didn't climb Arthur's Seat, partly because half the people we asked said we absolutely had to and the other half said, gently, that we had a three and four year old and should not.

We had four nights. That's not much in a city like this.

And this is the part Rebecca learned on this trip that we've taken everywhere since. At the National Museum, part of her was thinking: we've never been here, we might never come back, we have to see all of it. Which is how you push two small kids to exhaustion and make everyone miserable.

She let it go. We'd get to what we got to.

You aren't going to see everything, especially with small children. You have different capacities and limits, and you have to respect them. That's okay.

It was also a lesson in doing a bit of research ahead of time on a short trip, so you aren't spending half the morning deciding what to do. Both things are true.

A few practical things from our four nights:

This was my first real moment of realizing how far from home we were.

The Peak District was beautiful countryside. Edinburgh was something else: people from completely different backgrounds, all packed into one city, and somehow it all works together.

And the Scots we met were wonderfully direct about it. Explore our city, enjoy it, just do it respectfully. I appreciated that candor more than I can explain. I felt welcome because they were honest with me.

It set the bar high for everything that came after, and Britain kept meeting it.

We went on from there to three weeks in Carlisle and the Lake District, which I've written about here.

I'm already looking forward to going back to Edinburgh, staying out in Leith this time, and seeing whether Callum meant it about the golf.

Moving a family across the world is 10% planning and 90% "figuring it out as we go." If you want to see the daily chaos, the travel hacks we use in real-time, and what life actually looks like when the cameras aren't perfectly positioned, come hang out with us:

A few resources that have made our life abroad easier. These are affiliate links, which means we earn a small commission if you use them, at no extra cost to you.