Royal Wedding in St. Andrews

We're just back from the party in St. Andrews to celebrate the royal wedding. Photos below...

Emma made her own fascinator hat for the wedding.

At the party in St. Salvator's Quad

David and John signed the "wedding guest" register

The wedding was shown live through BBC on a big screen.

Emma and John with the guy from the "Other Guys" (see video below...)

The BBC prepares for a live broadcast from St. Salvator's Quad

The BBC chick

The BBC chick toasting the royal couple

Emma and John with Kate and Will and B. Janetta ice cream. Guess which one they like more?

David's serving of ice cream

Love the hat!

Live from London

The Other Guys on stage

Emma and John with Kate and Will made out of jelly beans at a St. Andrews candy store!

Sugar cookies with "royal" icing

Beer of choice...

The window at Fisher & Donaldson bakery

Outside the St. Andrews butcher shop

The wagers that one could make at Ladbrokes on the wedding...

A Royal Visit to Southern Scotland

Last weekend before Easter, we continued our tour of Scotland with a quick overnight to New Lanark, which is a small restored cotton mill on the Falls of Clyde that was developed by Robert Owens, who was a philanthropist and social reformer. Owens built housing for his mill workers, and provided an early form of health care and free education to all the children in New Lanark. He also started the world’s first nursery school for the “wee ones” of his millworkers. During his time, the mill was often visited

by European statesmen as a model for a healthy industrial environment with a vibrant and happy workforce. Still, the visitor center showed that working in the mill was not easy, and the tour was “led” by a 10 year old girl named Annie who worked ten hours a day, six days a week crawling under the noisy and dusty cotton thread machines to pick up stray balls of cotton. The tour of the village included a look into the school house, the company-owned general store, and a typical worker’s home, as well as the home of Robert Owens (which I especially found fascinating, since he left Scotland eventually and moved to Indiana to start another utopian community in New Harmony…not far from my hometown.) The visitor center was well done and the kids had a great time there, especially since John had remembered to bring his bouncy ball with him, and had also met a little boy from Glasgow at the hostel the night before (a “Glaswegian”…which is still hard for me to say with a straight face!) who walked around the site with us and his family. Overall the visit was a bit of a letdown however: it was pouring rain on Saturday, which put a damper on our planned hike along the “world-famous Falls of Clyde,” which turned out to be nothing more than a speedy creek meandering over a few boulders, despite the rain. David kept trying out new mottos for the village as we walked: “New Lanark: Now You Know Why Nobody Visits Southern Scotland.”

On the way home, we visited some of the sites associated with Mary Queen of Scots and her family. We started at Loch Leven Castle, which was built around 1300 and where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned for almost a year and forced to abdicate the throne (she apparently escaped by charming one of the other castle inhabitants to row her across the loch on a boat…). When we arrived, we were a bit surprised that she wasn’t able to escape earlier, since the small island with the castle wasn’t really far at all from the shore. The guy who was at the helm of the tiny motor boat that took us across to the island explained, however, that the water level in the loch had gone down quite a bit over the last few hundred years, so it was actually a much greater distance at the time of her imprisonment (and we also later learned that she was quite sick

during most of her imprisonment anyway, so probably wasn’t up for a lengthy dip in freezing cold Scottish loch water!) In any case, Loch Leven is a beautiful spot, and we had heard much about it since we have been in Scotland. Unfortunately, on the island, we also encountered something else we had heard much about since our arrival: midges! Midges (called “wee beasties” by the locals…) are like gnats, except they bite. They don’t usually come out until June, so we had hoped to avoid them, but this winter and spring has been much warmer than usual, so it looks like they are going to make an early appearance this year. There are many ways to avoid midges (staying in the sun, wearing beekeeper-style hats with nets on them, or even using a calor-gas driven machine that puts out a bovine scent and attracts them away from your garden party). Also, midges can’t fly as fast as we can walk, so as long as you’re on the move, you won’t be bothered by them. But the group of teenage girls trying to have a picnic in the shade of the castle right next to the loch were having no luck in avoiding them, and we stood on the castle walls and watched them furtively windmilling their arms for a while in an effort to shoo them off, then give up and pack up their toasties to have lunch on higher and sunnier ground. It was quite fun to watch, but we stayed for only a minute, until John tossed his bouncy ball into a patch of nettles alongside the castle, and David had to leave to venture into the woods after it.

We also stopped at Linlithgow Palace, which was built by King James I for Scottish royalty and is where Mary Queen of Scots was born. King James actually just rebuilt in, using a 12^th century royal manor, but he did quite a job! Or I should say his stonemasons did quite a job—I’m assuming he had very little to do with the actual work. James III, James IV and James V added to the palace as well, and James V’s French wife, Mary of Guise, was supposedly very fond of the place. She compared the palace to the finest of chateaux in France (and we all know that if the French compare one thing to something French, that means quite a lot!) and she spent quite a bit of time there (likely why her daughter Mary was born there eventually—she couldn’t give birth in a castle that looked Scottish, for heaven’s sake!). Though the palace is in ruins now, it’s quite well preserved, and though it is missing its roof, one can still get a good sense of what it must have looked like in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. The palace included elaborate royal suites and great halls, two levels of kitchens with wine cellars (one of which is just below the King’s

bedroom so he could keep an eye on who went in and who went out carrying what…), a larder and an alehouse, a courtyard with an ornate fountain in the center, and large towers on each of the four corners. The Historic Scotland tour guide that met us at the door explained that the Stuarts used the palace for royal gatherings and parties, and it was clear why. The various Jameses and Marys were obviously quite creative in the design and construction of a party palace (thankfully more so than they were in choosing baby names!). Emma loved the palace and wanted to tour every room, which was quite a feat because the palace is large and quite maze-like and features many nooks and crannies, but John just wanted to bounce that bouncy ball off all the walls in the great room (you know, I really hate that ball…but it has been lost and retrieved so many times on this trip that we have way too much invested in it to give up on it now!). He persisted (bouncing it off this wall, then that wall, then this wall again, higher and higher each time until it hit a stone at a funny angle and skittered sideways down a spiral staircase or out a turret window and had to be rescued) until David lost patience with him, then the two of them retreated to the lawn outside to play football. After Emma and I had climbed each turret and descended each and every cellar stair, we joined them outside for a quick tour of St. Michael’s church next door, then a quick hike down the hill to the high street for some cappuccino and strawberry ice cream!

Trial and Error Easter

At first, our celebration of Easter this year in Scotland seemed as if it would be similar, for the most part, to the way we celebrate in the States. Our church was planning a non-denominational Easter Day service, which we would attend in the morning. This service was held at 7:00 am (I think it was supposed to be similar to a sunrise service, but since the sun comes up at 5:20 am, that’s a bit tricky…) at the ruins of St. Mary’s on the Rock, which is between the North Sea and the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral. It was a glorious morning, and the service was full of people, and though I couldn’t hear all of what was being said because of the crashing of the waves, the part that I did hear was quite moving and inspired. Communion was given out at the altar of the Cathedral, and after that, the whole congregation moved over to the Scores in front of the castle to share a breakfast of sausage rolls.

Putting Easter lunch together for our family this year was a little trickier than I had anticipated, however. I managed to translate my grandmother’s recipe for nut bread into grams and milliliters with passable results, but I did have a bit of trouble procuring an Easter ham. There is no such thing as spiral-sliced, dry-cured ham here…it’s gammon, and it’s sold raw. I discovered this on Good Friday—too late to begin the soaking process required to remove all the salt from the raw, cured ham. Instead, I ended up buying several hunks of ham-off-the-bone from the deli counter (ignoring the quizzical look from the deli guy who must have wondered how large a ham sandwich I was planning to make with that quantity…) and removing it from the deli bag before going into the house so David didn’t see how much it cost (there’s certainly no 49 cents per pound Easter deals to be had here!). The best part was that, not only were the deviled eggs surprisingly tasty even though they were made with English mustard, they didn’t have the tell-tale ‘these are obviously recycled Easter eggs” streaks of blue dye across the whites. Apparently, the Pas Easter Egg dye company hasn’t tapped into the British market, because none of the Americans I knew could find egg-dying kits anywhere here. Either that, or they recognized that Easter egg dye just doesn’t work as well on dark brown British eggs.

I’m afraid that Easter this year was quite different for Emma and John, however. Since they are attending a Catholic school here, I figured that the in-school Stations of the Cross might be a bit jarring to them, but they seemed to get a lot out of it, and told us all about it when they came home (Emma even knows the Adoramus Te now…) Instead, the biggest difference for them was the difference in the more secular Easter traditions. For example, villages and towns here don’t do egg hunts, and Scottish kids don’t get Easter baskets. Instead, they all get one huge chocolate egg…often filled with other candies inside. I tried to find plastic eggs for an egg hunt with no luck, and I also tried to do baskets for the kids, and while I had no trouble assembling small chocolate eggs, I struck out on the jelly beans and the marshmallow chicks. And I could never find baskets meant for Easter, either. After searching several high street stores for a suitable substitute, I decided to use the baskets that are holding various dusty fake-flower arrangements in our rental house. But when I went to remove the flowers, I saw that they were too tightly fastened with some kind of industrial-strength floral foam adhesive, and had to abandon my idea. In the end, I used two large salad bowls, which did a fine job of holding the candy but made for an anti-climactic end to the hunt through the house for the Easter baskets.

“We can’t find our baskets,” they said when they reached the end of the clues.

“They’re right there in my dressing room!” I said.

“Oh,” they said, “do you mean these salad bowls filled with candy?”

I was a bit curious about why, when they first saw them there, they didn’t find anything strange or out of the ordinary about the discovery that I was hoarding salad bowls full of candy in my dressing room, but didn’t ask…

The Catholic school did encourage the kids to participate in a few secular Easter customs on Easter Monday, but they were quite different from what we were accustomed to in the States. All the kids were asked to decorate one egg, and bring it in on Monday. Since there’s no egg dye here, the kids use stickers and sequins and Sharpies, and some of the eggs can get quite elaborate. In Kircaldy, I had spotted some beautiful blue organza, and came up with the incredibly bright idea of having Emma decorate two eggs: one to look like Prince William and one to look like Kate Middleton in her blue engagement dress. She and David worked on it for hours on Easter Sunday (while I was getting desserts ready for the Colgate students who were coming over later in the day…) and the results were fabulous! The kids had also been asked to decorate an “Easter bonnet,” though the school didn’t provide much instruction on this. So I had given Emma a straw cowboy hat to bedazzle with rhinestones and plastic eggs, while John took my invitation to decorate a bonnet by saying, “A bonnet!? I’m not doin’ that!” In the end, he taped some white octagon-shaped pieces of paper onto a black knit cap to look like a soccer ball, with the caveat that he would agree to bring it with him to school but would certainly not wear it! The school hosted a bonnet parade at 2:15 pm, and all the parents were invited, so I went to see what it was like. I was horrified to see that all the other kids’ bonnets were incredibly elaborate architecturally sound creations (I saw foam concoctions, home-sewn creations of meters-worth of batting, and I think one kid had even created a hat-version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of toothpicks!), and that Emma’s beautiful eggs were lined up with about FIFTY other Will-and-Kate-in-her-sapphire-blue-wrap-dress eggs! So much for my brilliant idea!

If we ever come to St. Andrews in the spring again, at least next time I will know how to do Easter the right way in Scotland!

Loch Ness and Glen Urquhart Castle

We have been back for a few days from our trip to the Highlands, and are again unpacked and preparing for the next trip…an overnight to New Lanark in southern Scotland. In the meantime, here’s a recap of the last days of our Highland fling!On Saturday morning in Inverness, we continued with the one-surprise-per-family-member-theme of the trip, and went to Leakey’s, which is a huge second-hand book store in an old church a block from the river in Inverness. The place is dark and musty, and there are stacks and stacks of books in front of the stained glass windows. The choir loft has been renovated into a small café that sells homemade soups and breads, so the whole place was also filled with the smell of lentils and parsnips and coffee beans. I took the kids up to the café with some copies of Asterix books from the shelves, and let David browse the theology section for a few hours. The kids were more than happy to hang out…they had good books in front of them, and I ordered them a Sprite and a sticky toffee pudding to share, so they rode out their sugar rush with their noses in the books. I had my own stainless steel French press of dark roast and an old book about the Jacobite uprising, so I was happy to sit still as well and let David shop. He came away with a big bag of books, and I added to the pile with a Jamie Oliver cookbook to take home as a souvenir.

We drove from Inverness south along the A82, which hugs

Loch Ness for over 20 miles. Loch Ness is part of the Great Glen, which is a series of long, narrow lochs that run from north to south and follow the geological fault that splits the Highlands into two parts. The Caledonian Canal links the lochs, so one can

travel from Inverness in the north all the way to Fort William in the south. Not only are the lochs beautiful, but they are full of historic sites as well, since they were used by the various Scottish clans to travel and to seize land from each other—this was an

especially important area for Bonnie Prince Charlie during the Jacobite uprisings (as I learned earlier in the bookstore…). Of course, most people driving down the A82 are not doing so in search of historic sites from the Bonnie prince’s day—they are too busy keeping one eye on the

black water of the loch in hopes of spotting the Loch Ness monster! The small town of Drumnadrochit (even the Scots can’t pronounce it, and just call it “Drum” instead) capitalizes on this with not one, but two Loch Ness Visitor Centers…one right next door to the other. There’s not much else to see in the town (though I did enjoy taking pictures of all the road signs in Gaelic) except the centers, and we decided to skip them, though I did take Emma into the gift shop of one because it had the largest collection of stuffed animals in all of Scotland—and that was her surprise for the trip. She passed on my suggestion to purchase a stuffed “Heilan Coo,” and opted for a pair of Scotty dogs instead.

In Drumnadrochit, we stopped at the Clansman Hotel, and took a Jacobite cruise out on Loch Ness. The cruise line gave all the kids on board small backpacks full of colored pencils and coloring books, and they spent the whole cruise hunched over the books reading about the Monster. For me, the cruise was interesting because the boat had a sonar screen mounted on top that displayed the current depth of the loch (it got to 730 feet while I was watching, though the loch is a bit deeper in other spots), and the captain provided running commentary about the history of the loch and the various Nessie sightings (and hoaxes!). When the cruise was over, a little girl sitting next to the kids who had also been hunched over her coloring book the whole time turned to her father and said, “Oh, darn, Daddy, I was messing aboot and forgot to see the Loch Ness monster. Did YOU see the Loch Ness monster, Daddy, or were you messign aboot as well?” It was pretty cute!

The weather had turned a bit bitter at this point, so we drove through Drumnadrochit to Glenurquhart for the night, where we stayed in possibly the cleanest hostel I have ever seen. In true Scottish fashion, the owner saw us pull up and came out of his house with his dog, and when I unrolled the car window, he said, “Hiya, Julie!” I think I had exchanged exactly two emails with him (and hadn’t paid him a dime yet…or a pence, I suppose) but he still greeted me like family.

This hostel was a hit with the kids as well, because it included a huge “adventure playground” outside the communal kitchen and had free wifi so they could rent the next Harry Potter movie to watch before bed. The next morning, we drove back to Loch Ness to see Glen Urquhart Castle, which is possibly the loveliest castle ruin we have seen so far (and has probably the most well-considered visitor center I have yet seen…it features a short film about the history of the castle with a little surprise twist at the end…and I won’t give it away in case you visit someday!)

One of the castle attendants noticed that John had brought his own wooden sword (the one we bought in York at the Viking exhibit), and took us into a back room to let us see a real sword. He let John put on an incredibly heavy helmet as well, and David put on the chain mail with him. After that, John’s wooden sword seemed to lose a bit of its luster for him!

After the castle, we got back in the car and headed towards home, driving past Ben Nevis on the way and stopping by the side of the road to take some photos. We stopped for lunch in Pitlochry, which is a small village of about 2,500 people on the River Tummel, and a popular tourist resort with a Victorian style high street that’s home to Scotland’s smallest whisky distillery. As a result, the sandwiches we managed to find at a small bakery were unusual…I got smoked duck with lemongrass marmalade, and David had a pheasant and green apple chutney baguette. We got Emma a toasty with “sun-blushed tomato, mozzarella and pesto, and John wanted venison (again!), and we took our lunch to a small park by the river to eat. Then we continued on our way, stopping in Dunkeld for a quick hike to the Hermitage, which is a wild garden built by the son-in-law of the Duke of Atholl in the 1750s. We made it to the waterfall and

to Ossian’s Hall, which is perched high above the waterfall and

affords a stunning view. We intended to carry on further down the path to Ossian’s Cave, but at the waterfall the kids wanted to play on the rocks a bit, and when I tried to follow them, I slipped on a rock and fell right in! David was right behind me and said it was a spectacular fall, but I was just so relieved that I somehow had the presence of mind to hold my camera up high enough to keep it out of the water. The rest of me wasn’t so luck, and I was soaked from the waist down. I did learn something from the experience: if I though the water in Scotland in April was cold, it was only because I hadn’t yet experienced the air temperature in Scotland in April while wearing soaking wet denim! I

managed to hang out with the kids for another 20 minutes or so, stopping periodically to wring water out of my socks, but after a while, I was too cold to continue and left the three of them there to go look for dry clothes back in the car!

Carrbridge and Inverness

On Friday morning, we checked out of the hostel and drove into the mountain resort town of Aviemore. We stayed for only a few minutes—long enough to pop into the Tesco for some fruit, then kept going north to the village of Carrbridge. Here, we visited the Landmark Forest Adventure Park, which is a collection of treetop walkways and ropes courses for kids of all ages. We all started with the lowest course, which was only about 20 feet off the ground, but still involved putting on harnesses and carabiners, and working our way across 10-12 rope obstacles. Since there was a crowd of people moving through the course one after the other, we couldn’t go too quickly. We noticed that what often slowed us

down was a family ahead of us with two parents and two small children. Of course, it wasn’t the children who were causing the traffic jam—it was always the mother of the children who didn’t realize that she was terribly afraid of heights until she got up there. In one case, there was a little boy of about five who was almost pulling his mother through the course behind him, saying soothing words of encouragement to her as she felt her way through with her eyes squeezed shut tight. On our first trip through, David decided that he really wanted to test out the whole harness and carabiner contraption, so while we were all waiting on a tree platform for the mom-traffic to clear ahead of us, he jumped off the platform and dangled triumphantly for a while, to demonstrate his fearlessness. His act of bravery attracted a bit of attention from the spectators below, which was fine until he decided that he had been dangling long enough and it was time to get back up on the platform. Which he could not do, of course. He tried pulling with his arms, but he was too far below the platform for that to work, so he tried kicking with his legs, but there was a kid on the obstacle behind him so he

couldn’t use that part of the rope for his foot. So he dangled there for a moment like a piñata (and since the nuts and candies that he had in his pockets were raining down on the spectators below, he really WAS like a piñata!), and his audience was suddenly quite interested in his predicament, and increased in number! Finally, he convinced the kid behind him to move back far enough to allow him to use that length of rope to hoist himself back up on the platform. Once he got back up on the platform, Emma shook her head at him and said, “Well, Daddy, at least now you’ll make it into Mommy’s blog!” After that, he wasn’t quite as interested in having another go on the ropes courses, and let the three of us proceed while he went in search of some tea.

We stayed at the park through mid-afternoon, riding the roller coasters and the water slides that somehow didn’t get the riders wet (a good thing since it was at most 15 degrees celsius outside…), and letting the kids play on the huge slides at the front of the park while we drank cappuccino and tried to understand the Scottish conversations going on around us. When the kids tired of the slides and climbers, we got back in the car and drove towards Inverness. Along the way, we stopped at Bogbain Adventure Farm, where we rented a quad bike for the kids to ride. It was a small junior quad but they had a blast nonetheless once they got the hang of the throttle, and took turns driving around the dirt track. They had the place to themselves, which was a good thing since Emma couldn’t manage to keep the bike on the track and kept running over the tires that were bordering it. John did pretty well, though, except that he had to use both hands to push his thumb down on the throttle from time to time, meaning that we moved around the track in two speeds—fast and stop. Even I got a little motion-sick watching him!

By late afternoon, we made it to Inverness and parked the car, then walked along the river in

search of a spot for dinner. This can be tricky in Scotland, since restaurants seem to come in only a few varieties—the pub, the Indian restaurant, the high-end white-tablecloth place that serves a three-course dinner for upwards of £20 per person, or the grubby fish and chips and deep-fried-Mars-bar shops. We have had way too much Indian food recently to make the second one an option, and were generally adverse to the latter one. Travelling in Scotland can be frightfully expensive (even with the hostels) so we decided that the three-course dinner would be financially unwise and went with the pub. These can sometimes be tricky with kids because the rules on which kids can go in at what times of the day to which parts of the pub are a bit complicated—and often explained in an exceptionally heavy (i.e. unintelligible) Scottish accent. And though pubs are smoke-free, there’s always a small crowd of pub patrons chain-smoking just outside the front door, so one has to pass through a thick fog to even get into the place. But we picked one that seemed fairly kid friendly (despite the large hen party sitting just inside that were all wearing matching Playboy-bunny-ear headbands…), and were pleasantly surprised. I actually managed to order one of the very few Scottish meals that showed up without a side of chips and mushy peas (though the kids’ meals included both…and both remained untouched), and David’s chicken became palatable once he had coated it in brown sauce. Of course, it took us about two hours to eat, as is typical here, since it’s considered rude

for the waiter to place the bill on the table until you ask for it yet it’s also impossible to locate a waiter once your food has been served. So once we actually managed to flag a waiter down and pay for our meal, it was almost 9 o’clock at night, and we headed right to the hostel for the evening.

Our Highland Fling

I have been planning a Highlands trip for the four of us since we have arrived in Scotland, as it’s supposed to be the highlight of any trip to the country. Since the kids are at the tail end of their spring break, we hit the road on Thursday morning. I drove, because David was working under a grant deadline. The kids camped out in the back seat, surrounded by pillows, blankets, stuffed animals and a big bag of snacks, and we didn’t hear a peep out of them for the first two-hour leg of the trip, though periodically I would smell a strange odor coming from the back seat, and figured that one of them had either taken off their socks, or had just opened a bag of Walker’s Salt and Vinegar crisps. We drove up the A9, which is a moderately wide “dual carriageway,” and it was luxurious to have that much space on both sides of the car. Since two lanes were going in one direction, I almost felt like I was back in the States, driving on an interstate highway, except I had to keep reminding myself to stay in the left hand lane, and pass on the right. The scenery was lovely…we were passing by Ben Macdui and through the Monadhliath Mountains, which were shrouded in Scottish mist. In parts, the landscape became quite rocky and scrubby, and if it weren’t for the low stone walls and daffodils lining the road, it sometimes looked positively lunar!

As we drove, I realized that many of the differences between the United States and Scotland become quite evident on a “dual carriageway.” Language, of course, is different—the word “exit” becomes “way out” here, and a pull-off is a “lay-by.” Parking lots are “car parks” and a dead end is a “T junction.” But the scenery is markedly different as well, and I think it’s mostly because there are absolutely no billboards here. Drivers can enjoy the views of the Munros without interruption by Geico or Hampton Inn. There are also no interstate exits clogged with Burger King/Cracker Barrel/Mobil gas station combinations lining the road. It’s all quite undeveloped, and the only signs one sees are those put up by the government—even those that mark a commercial destination like a for-profit castle or historic site. It’s quite tasteful and refreshing! The other difference is the size of the cars themselves… and even the names of the cars. In the States, cars seem to be named after large Western cities or outdoorsy occupations that imply masculinity and mechanical prowess. Here the cars seem to have been named after nouns drawn out of a hat one night at the pub, with no concern for the statement the car makes about the person who owns it. I saw the Honda Jazz, the Nissan Note, the Fiat Panda, the Volkswagon Golf…and my personal favorite, the Toyota Picnic. Nothing masculine about the word “picnic!”

Our first stop during our family’s own Highland Fling was the House of Bruar, which was a big Scottish food hall and “country living” emporium…and here “country living” means cashmere and tweed and high-end spey fishing reels. The food emporium was glorious—full of brambleberry marmalades, homemade rough oatcakes, Isle of Arran cheeses, smoked salmon, and Highland tarts. Even the women’s bathroom was the epitome of Scottish luxury, with wool rugs, olivewood louvered doors, and soap dispensers full of Highland heather and lavender soap. The best part, however, was that the taps for the sink actually mixed the hot water and the cold water, and dispensed it out of one central faucet…certainly a first in Scotland, where one usually has to turn on both taps that are spaced quite far apart in the sink and wave one’s hands back and forth quickly in a burn-freeze-burn-freeze attempt at washing one’s hands without serious injury. We came away with some House of Bruar lemon curd, a Border tart, and Scottish tablet, which is a super-sweet concoction similar to very dry, crumbly fudge—a big hit with (and only with) the kids! The kids also picked out “chocolate bean” cookies (the word here for “generic M&M) that they ate in the car on the second leg of the trip. Fortunately, chocolate beans have no discernible backseat smell!

After browsing for a bit (we could only afford the food at this place!), we hiked a short trail to the nearby Falls of Bruar and had a quick lunch at the side of the falls. The kids stopped at the “adventure playground” on the way back, then we all hopped back in the car for another hour drive up to the Cairngorms, which is the highest land mass in Britain. In Aviemore, we stopped at Rothiemurches Center, which is a public estate filled with Caledonia pine trees and sub-arctic tundra vegetation , and rented mountain bikes for the afternoon. These were no typical rental bikes…the kids were given bikes with gears and handbrakes, which took a while for them to figure out (Emma was puzzled that she couldn’t stop by pedaling backwards, for example!), but which they loved in the end. My bike and David’s bike had internal gears and super-hefty shocks, and when I first got on, I was convinced that my tires must have been flat because it was so springy. The bike rental place gave us a map and sent us on our way. Aviemore is chock-ful of bikers, and there are lovely wide bike paths everywhere. We headed towards Loch en Eilen first, where the ruins of a castle sit in the middle of a small island in the loch, and rode a path around the loch for an hour or so. In the distance, we could see the snow-capped mountains, which were quite beautiful. John and I were riding just a bit ahead of David and Emma, and John was thrilled to be on a bike again after so many months of not using one. He was cruising ahead of me and looking around, and then suddenly let out with a “Whooo…I love nature!” which was pretty funny. Then we met up with a boy who looked to be about 10 or 11, who was having trouble navigating an especially steep hill. He was also having trouble telling his right from his left, so the directions his father was providing weren’t of much help. After they passed, John launched into a soliloquy about how kids of a certain age should just be expected to be able to do certain things, like tie their shoe or tell their directions, and how they should be expected to NOT do certain things…like throw a tantrum or hit their sister. After a pause, he added, “Though, I guess I’m not really that kind of a kid…”

After our ride, we stopped in the Rothiemurches Farm Shop and bought some venison for dinner, then drove down the road a bit to our hostel, which was an old shooting lodge across from Loch Morlich. We dropped off our luggage and made a quick dinner (the venison was delicious, and we made some British greens with feta cheese to go along with it) and then walked across the street for a hike around the loch, which features a large, wide sandy beach. John brought his soccerball in the hopes of finding a group of kids with which to play football, but made do with his sister, until they found a huge bleached-out tree to climb. The loch was stunning, bordered by the snow-covered Cairngorm mountains in the distance, and we stayed until the sun set, then walked back to the hostel and went to bed.