Blogs from Scotland, United Kingdom, Europe - page 486

Well, its been a little while since I've had a chance to log on and bore you all with another installment of what I've been up to - so sit back and relax, this could take a while.. It seems like the last couple of weeks have absolutely flown by. Our wonderful Contiki tour manager Matt did mention that 16 days would go by quite qickly, and he wasn't kidding! We finished our Contiki tour yesterday - I would never have thought that I'd actually be disapointed to see London, but I've had so much fun I really didn't want the tour to end. Although, its probably a good thing that we didnt go for too much longer - good to end while most people were all still on friendly terms! I'm having trouble remembering exactly ... read more

Got up reasonably early, stuffed myself silly on the free Scottish breakfast complemented by the sweet Scottish lady: "D'ye fancy a cooked breakfas', dearie?" and then voyaged out into the rain (of course this is Tacoma-style rain, not Hawaii downpour). Beautiful train ride, all sheep and green green hillsides, budding trees and awesome cloud formations. Still didn't catch the ferry till noon-ish, and then sacrificed my Hawaii-Mexico acclimated extremities to my desire to see the view. Arran did the total movie-ish rising out of the mist like the answer to a quest, and nobody was more exicted to get off that boat and into the hills than me. I took a different bus than the one I wanted, and have never been so happy to be on the wrong bus. It looped around the northern coast, ... read more

Being my first visit to Stirling, I didn't know what to expect. I live about 45 minutes away from the place and have never really thought that it would be a very interesting place to see. Sure I knew about the castle and the Wallace monument, but to be honest, the thought of visiting never really occured to me before. As it was a sunday, and the first slightly mild one we have had for a while(after Scotlands recent arctic weather) and my oldest daughter getting over a tummy bug, the family decided it was time to blow of the cobwebs and get out again. How we decided on Stirling, i'm not quite sure, but I'm glad we did. The town centre is pretty easy to drive into and the first thing we couldn't help but ... read more

Caught up with Brendan Laney after driving up from London (about 9 hours in total) we stayed the night just out of Leeds. Cold and wet. Couldn't make the most of it because of weather. Will definitely return.... read more

So Id booked myself onto a 4 day PP bus tour to Edinburgh for Hegemony. Sis Merrett was going to come along, but ended up having to work instead. All her flatmates came up on one of the other buses though, and 2 of them were tour leaders, so it was sweet. Didn’t matter anyway, as I was on the double decker bus, with about 50 other Kiwi’s and Aussies, so made a bunch of mates pretty quickly. 30-12-04 Early start at Paddington, then we were off on our 9 hour journey to Edinburgh. Didn’t really hit the booze on the way up, only one toilet and I didn’t want to peak early either. Crew in the back seat started in from the start though, (they knew each other from Beerfest, so had had some practice!) ... read more