Beauty and the Beard:
Bound to Wander

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...

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...

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!