Pentland Hills and Property

Saturday we took a nice little walk through some farms in the Pentland Hills just south of Edinburgh. It's so nice here that private property in the American sense doesn't really exist. In Scotland, anybody has the right to walk through someone's land, and even camp! Can you imagine walking on some cattle rancher's farm and setting up a tent in the middle of Tennessee? You'd get shot or attacked by dogs. But here they build little fence gates and bridges to make it easier for people to walk through! So, we walked through some cow pasture and then a sheep pasture in these amazing rolling hills. Marius loves being in his backpack and was laughing the whole time. I tried to use our baby sign language to show him the cows and sheep, but I'm not sure he followed what I was doing. Simon is going to try to do some research out here, so he was scoping out the soil and erosion. It's not a bad place for research, since it's so pretty! I am still hoping he'll find some place in Spain or California for research, then Marius and I can go along and enjoy the trip too!!! We can help dig soil pits!
Sunday was mostly spent checking out different neighborhoods in Edinburgh. We're getting a lot closer to really looking for a place to buy. But since we really don't know the city too well, we still need to do a lot of walking around places to get a feel for whether we want to live there or not. There are so many nice options, it really makes things difficult. But our biggest decision is either to stay in town and have a smaller place that's within walking distance to everything we need, or move out of town a bit and have a larger house with a garden, but have to commute into town for work. Six of one half a dozen of the other right? Eventually we'll figure it out!