Off to Scotland

Hey All,

Only 2 weeks behind on this post, but it should be a quick one, as we raced around Scotland like a bats out of hells <sic>.

As I mentioned on our Christmas post, we spent a quiet Christmas eve at our flat in Loughborough.  Had a surprisingly good meal, which was entirely from a box, care of Tesco.  That could be a whole different post about the pre-made meals here.

Christmas morning we packed up and headed off for our next adventure.
Our first destination was Christmas dinner with a classmate of mine and his family inside the Scottish Borderlands.  The drive throughout this area was beautiful, but at the same time we had to be a bit careful, because just about the entirety of Scotland is flooded right now.  We just encountered a bit of shallow water across the road luckily.

This was our coffee stop

After Christmas dinner with Tommy and his family, we had a short drive through the snow (yes, we had a white Christmas, including a few snowballs tossed around), we spent Christmas night in a 300 year old pub and inn.


The next day our goal was to make it to Edinburgh.  We meandered our way there, stopping in a couple of villages and towns along the way, including a short hike up to the statue of William Wallace.

We made it to Edinburgh around 3:30 pm.  It's hard to believe, but this is the end of daylight for us in these parts.  We didn't even think about it, but Edinburgh is at a higher latitude than Grand Prairie, AB.  Luckily, nowhere near as cold.
We were disappointed to see that many of the shops and stores, including all of the historical sites were closed because it was Boxing Day, and also pouring rain.
We did find an awesome restaurant for dinner before we made our way to the Edinburgh Christmas market.  It was a good market, compared with others we've seen this year, including several mulled wine and mulled cider stands.  As they had no squatting pooping figurines, we just browsed, and drank wine.

On the morning of the 27th we met up with our intrepid traveling friends Whit and Robyn at the base of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh for a sun-rise climb up the hill.  What we learned quickly is we collectively have the worst sense of direction, particularly when it comes to finding a reasonable route up a hill.  I think it was the runners who really deceived us, because we followed them along a path.... about 10 minutes later we found ourselves nearly clinging to the steep side of the hill, and wondering just how we managed to find ourselves here.

Hey Guys, this doesn't at all look like the worst way we could choose to climb this hill

We did eventually make it to the top, and our timing was impeccable, as the sun was just dropping above the horizon.

Kristin wins the award for first to the top.

Tin man was properly anchored against the wind due the a sufficiently high coefficient of friction

Earl Numbers was not so much.... Grab him quickly

We tried to recreate a caganer scene in Scotland... well one of us did.

Exercise out of the way for another week, we piled into our cars, and started making our way up the Scottish coast towards Aberdeen.  We made some small stops along the way in various towns and ancient abbeys,

Coffee Break day 2

We didn't properly stop to see this, it's a moving car shot, but I'm pretty sure this is a railroad bridge.... man those engineers sure know how to build it.

but our goal was to be at Dunnottar Castle for sunset.  We didn't tour the castle, but the photos from outside are remarkable in their own right.

Ok, so we though we'd try our hand at some jumping photos....here's the thing about jumping photos... we can't time them worth a damn.... I filtered about 40 to get these.

32 of those were to get this shot.

On to Aberdeen and our first European Escape Room.  Robyn and Whit did a great job finding and solving the puzzles.  We managed to escape in 61 minutes... not our best performance, but the puzzles were pretty obscure, and the logic jumps required to solve them awfully big.  Finishing off the night with a very small dram of some scotch, Whit, Robyn and Kris all commented that although it tasted like burning... there was a faint hint of something else in there enjoyable.... AHA the narrow edge of the wedge.

Next morning we headed off early once more on our last day in Scotland.  We stopped by a really rather sad hedge maze.... If you picked the right one of the 3 ways you could go at the start, you walked directly to the centre... not even one chance to turn the wrong way.  If you picked either of the other two... into a world of confusion for you.
Our next stop was Craigievar Castle, the castle that supposedly inspired Walt Disney / Cinderella's castle.  While about 4 orders of magnitude smaller, it does have an unmistakably pink hue to it.  Once again, as it was the christmas weekend, we didn't have a chance to go inside, but the pictures of the outside and countryside are rather nice.

After finding a quick geocache nearby, we were back in the car for a true taste of what C-level roads in the UK are all about.
A side note on driving in the UK.  The cars - they're surprisingly fast.... while a fair bit smaller than their North American counterparts, the have engines that really do speed them along quite capably.  The Roads - they're NEVER straight.  This is probably due to the fact that most were set out as carriage pathways several centuries ago, but if you have a straightaway of 500 m, that's truly amazing.  The British - have absolutely no trouble, qualm, or hesitation to combine these two points to create some hair-raising, at times stomach turning experiences.
Not usually one prone to motion sickness I actually had to ask Kris at one point to pull over and let me catch a few breaths of fresh air.

Perhaps an unexpected benefit of having roads that are so twisty and turny, and literally right beside farms (in some cases, the livestock, mostly sheep, freely graze in the roadside ditch), is that you get to see lots of varied creatures along the way.  Here are a few of our favourites.

Highland Cows with their fuzzy heads

and an impressive herd of deer (I think they were deer)

Our last stop was a short hike around the waterfall at Burn O Vat.  It's a cool rock crevice that has been carved out by the flowing water... one unfortunate side effect of all the rain we got was this photo is about as close as we were able to walk.  During normal water flows, you can walk through the crevice into another wider area.  

That's about all for our Scotland experience.  Kris and I made a quick dash down the highway back to Loughborough (about 6 hours) so she could be back at work the next day.
It was definitely too short, but we'll try to return in the summer when the weather is a little more hospitable.

I promise we'll have the Wales trip up soon