Beauty and the Beard:
Bound to Wander

  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 receive

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. Finally, Aaron

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

We finally got a day to sleep in and this was our nicest hotel room yet. It had by far the most comfortable bed. We ate a late breakfast and, by the time we started getting ready to leave the room, it was about time to start thinking about what to do for lunch. However, we had some hiking to do. The Old Man of Storr is a huge rock on top of a hill on the northern part of the Isle of Skye. It was only about a terrifying 15 minute drive from our hotel. The hike was easy, but long. The view was amazing. Getting up to the old man wasn’t too bad. Getting back down was a bit of a scramble. It was steep, and there was a lot of loose rock. We were there for 2 or 3 hours before we decided to hunt for some cliff sides. After another 15 minutes of less horrible, but still stressful, driving we made it to Lealt falls. We noticed a lot of the water is brown here compared to Iceland or Canada. We assumed it’s because it’s less glacial water, and more groundwater and rainfall. Kilt Rock & Mealt c

Wednesday we woke up VERY early only to realize that we had mapped to the wrong Mallaig and only needed 1.5 hours to travel northwest, not 2.5 southeast. We dragged a bit but still hit the road by 9:45.  There weren’t too many stops on the way, but we did pull into the carpark at the Glenfinnan Viaduct. That’s the famous bridge from the Harry Potter movies. You know, the one that Harry takes to Hogwarts. C’mon guys, know your nerd trivia. Anyways, it cost money to park, it was raining, and we had a ferry to catch so we did not hike up to it. It looked neat though.  We made it to the ferry a little early and caught the 12:00 on standby. The harbor crossing looked a lot like the harbor in Husavik. It was a pleasant crossing with nice views, except every time you looked in the center and saw the giant tour bus tilting back and forth, you’d want to throw up. Once back in the car, it was an hour drive up to Portree in the northern part of the Isle. We had some lunch at a small cafe before c

At breakfast, we got a disappointing email. Our car was back in Glasgow. It wasn’t all the way back at the airport, but it was still about an hour away. Once we got our car, we still had another 2 and half hour drive to our second hotel. By the time we read the email, it was already almost 9am. This didn’t leave us a lot of time to explore the town of Stirling, so we ate breakfast quickly. Aaron tried black pudding for the first time, which is basically a mix of sheep's blood, barely, and other spices. He’s still on the fence about the taste.  The only thing we really had time to see was Stirling castle, which was great! It was basically a giant museum with lots of really interesting displays. It made us very aware of the fact that we don’t know much about Scottish history, so we added Braveheart, Mary Queen of the Scotts, and Highlander to our list of movies to watch. We’re pretty sure that should cover everything. After a quick lunch at the castle’s cafe, we decided to get a cab

This was the earliest day that we needed to be up so far. Our flight left at 12:05pm. We got an email a few days before asking us to be there 2.5 hours early. It’s a European airport, and we weren’t taking any chances, so we wanted to be there by 9:35am. Tavistock was 2 hours away from the Bristol Airport, so we needed to leave by 7:30am. We also needed to turn in our car, so call that 30 minutes. We needed to leave by 7am. We were out before 7:15. There was a little bit of struggle with the maps, but we got there on time. Security was a breeze. We were throught by 10am. This is when we saw that our flight had been delayed until 1:05, and they wouldn’t give us the gate information until 12:15. Classic case of hurry up and wait. We got some breakfast. We read. We people watched. Before you know it, 12:15 came and went without any gate information. The message on the boards changed from “Gate Info at 12:15” to “Gate info shortly”. Around 12:35, the message changed to “Flight delayed 2:45

The day arrived for the main event! The thing that brought us to the UK in the first place! We started the day with a tasty breakfast included with the Hotel. We then went to meet with the rest of the family at the Tavistock market. The ladies wanted to look at some big fancy hats. It kind of just turned into a bunch of family members blocking this poor woman’s hat store, but we got a lot of good visiting in. We wandered around the market for a few hours and grabbed some lunch before we went back to get ready for the wedding. The wedding was at Brentor Church. It was a tiny little 500 year old church on top of a very tall, very windy hill surrounded by the english countryside. It was kind of unreal. All that driving on the left side of the road was totally worth it. Everyone looked great, and everyone had a good time. At the reception we had biscuits, and brownies, and Pasties (a meat pastry). It was so much fun seeing family, especially on the other side of the world. Unfortunately, w

We were in a bit of a rush this morning. We needed to catch a train at Paddington station to Bristol at 12:02, and the station was about 30 minutes away. Checkout was at 10, and we wanted to see Kensington Gardens, so we needed to leave early. The night before, Aaron was reading about the history of the hotel, and discovered it was designed by one of the designers of the Titanic. There’s a dragon on the stairwell in the hotel that’s a twin to a dragon on the stairwell of the Titanic. The one at the Hotel is called ‘Lucky George’. It’s lucky, because it didn’t go down with the ship. We rubbed it’s head for a little good luck, and we were on our way.  Once we got to Paddington, we got our train tickets, dropped off our bags, then started power walking to Kensington Gardens. By the time we got there we were already starting to get worried about missing our train, so we really didn’t get to explore much. There’s a statue of Peter Pan, and we got some selfies of that, but that was about it.

We woke up a little late. We ate breakfast outside at a place called Salt and Pepper. It was only a short walk away from our hotel, and right next to the British Museum of Natural History. We didn't want to spend all day at the museum. The plan was to get in, see some Egyptian stuff, see some Grecko-Roman stuff, and get out. But when we walked in, we saw an interesting exhibit called Feminine Power: The Devine to the Demonic (or something like that). So we paid to go through it, and it was worth it. Some really old art in there. We got to the Egyptian & Roman stuff, and Aaron accidentally recreated some photos from 2015 again.  Enough about the Museum. We're trying to keep these short. Next up was Kings Cross. There wasn't really anything interesting at Kings Cross, it was just the station that was closest to the place we stayed at last time we were here. It's always a little weird revisiting places. We tried to go to platform 9 and 3/4, but there was a HUGE line. T

We agreed to make our blog posts shorter to see if we can actually finish them. Just a few sentences. It's the start of day 2 now, so here's day one: Aaron sat next to a big guy on the plane. He wasn't fat, his shoulders were just wider than the seats, so Aaron didn't really get to sleep on the plane. After we landed, we took the train straight to our hotel. The Kimpton Fitzroy London is a bit nicer than the prison turned hostel we stayed at last time.  After a quick nap, we got some dinner at an Italian resteraunt, then took a long walk around Wesminster to try and recreate some of our photos we took last time we were here. It was 7 years ago. On the way back to the hotel, we decided last minute to go see Buckingham palace again. That's it! End of Blog Post!