Beauty and the Beard:
Bound to Wander

When we left off, we were sitting in the airport lounge waiting for our second attempt at getting to Lisbon. Honestly, the lounge was actually super nice and quiet, so we got a little work done and Kaylea managed to squeeze in a nap. About 40 minutes before boarding, Kaylea changed into pajamas with the full plan of immediately passing out the second we got into our seats. Which sounded great in theory. Except boarding was kind of a nightmare. Our gate was literally the very last gate in the terminal. Like a solid 20-minute speed walk from the lounge, and by the time we got there, the vibes were already bad. We had gotten rebooked into separate seats, and apparently half the plane had too because multiple people kept asking us if we’d switch seats so they could sit with their spouses. Somehow though, we lucked out. Another couple was in basically the exact same setup we were. Aaron was behind the husband and Kaylea was behind the wife, so we swapped seats with them and ended up sit...

We were supposed to wake up in Lisbon. Instead, we woke up near Dulles Airport with no luggage, no clean clothes, and a new mission: squeeze as much DC as possible out of one accidental layover day without missing our second chance at Portugal. The plan was simple. Get clean clothes. Find food. Hit the National Mall. See as much of DC as we could in the few hours we had. Then, most importantly, get to our flight on time. We were about ten minutes from the closest Target, forty minutes from DC, and ten minutes from the airport. Our flight wasn’t until 10:30 p.m., so technically, we had time. Then we woke up late. It had taken us a while to get settled the night before. We had to call our first hotel in Lisbon and let them know that, despite the fact that our flight had arrived on time, we had not arrived with it. Instead, we would be showing up the next day. By 9 a.m., we realized we'd probably be skipping breakfast in favor of making a quick Target run and maybe grab some snacks th...

We were ready. Bags packed. House clean. Bedsheets changed. Floors vacuumed. The kind of pre-vacation preparedness that makes you feel like you might finally be becoming real adults. We were on time. But alas, the winds were not in our favor. Quite literally. Storms rolled in from the west right as we were heading to the airport. Somehow, we still made it there in mostly light sprinkles and even managed to get from the parking garage to the terminal without getting rained on. Check-in was easy. Security didn’t even pull Aaron aside for additional screening, which honestly felt suspiciously lucky. That was about where our luck ran out. To preface all of this: our flight to Lisbon had a 65-minute layover in DC. It was already going to be tight. Once we got to the airline lounge, we quickly realized we might be in trouble. The place was packed with stressed-out people staring at their phones, pacing around, and loudly explaining their travel disasters to anyone within earshot. Apparently ...

  We woke up early (for us) and walked 25 minutes to Edinburgh Castle. Unfortunately, the tickets to tour the castle were sold out. Apparently, we were supposed to have booked several days in advance. Who knew? We’ll hit it next time. That was our big plan for the day, so we had to improvise. We made our way down the street to St Giles Cathedral to take some pictures. We’d been in Europe for almost 2 weeks, and still hadn’t gone into any big old cathedrals. We picked a good one. We stopped in a small shop for some coffee and pastries. There was a book exchange with a strange looking book called Bored of the Rings . It’s a Lord of the Rings parody. They let us take it because Kaylea couldn’t get through reading the summary without laughing. After that, we went into a few shops to look for some souvenirs. We weren’t looking too hard. There just really wasn’t a lot more to do than shop since our plans had been thrown off. It was around this time that Aaron realized that we hadn’t rec...

We woke up and had a nice breakfast before heading out to see Inverness. There wasn’t a whole lot to see in the city center besides some shopping, so we mostly just wandered around looking at the old buildings. We took a stroll next to the river and stopped to read the monuments along the way. There are A LOT of monuments all over the country. Many of them are monuments to foreigners who assisted Scotland in some way, but most seem to pay tribute to military heroes. After about an hour of exploring, we headed back to the car to be on our way.  Our first stop for the day was a museum at the battlefield of Culloden, which was only a few minutes from the city center. We spent a few hours reading about the history through a timeline-of-events exhibit before walking around the actual battlefield. Once again, we were faced with the fact that we really don’t know a lot about Scottish history, but it was still a fascinating exhibit.  After Culloden, we had to drive to Edinburgh. Final...

On a lot of these roads, there is no speed limit. It seems like people take that to mean, drive as fast as you can. Nobody seems to mind that there are no lines on the road, or the road is made of dirt, or you can barely fit one car on the road. There are plenty of signs saying “Blind Turns”, or “Slow”, or Aaron’s favorite “Oncoming vehicles in middle of road.” There might as well just be a bunch of signs saying “Fingers Crossed”. Well after another butt clenching drive, we made it to the Fairy Pools of Skye Island. It was probably our favorite hike so far. It had crystal clear ponds and waterfalls, and tons of rocks to climb on. There were plenty of people swimming in the pools, unfortunately, we didn’t have our swimsuits handy. But we climbed around. We took it all in. Eventually, we made our way out. On the way to our next stop was yet another castle. Eilean Donan Castle was a castle from the 13th century that had been destroyed, then rebuilt in the 1930’s as...