Another Week...and visitors...gone

Apologies for the delay in posting...and apologies that I just noticed that by adding a little post script to my last entry about the botanical gardens, I cancelled the publication of it and it was never actually posted. So, I guess today you get a 2-for-1 deal!

It's a Saturday morning here...bright and sunny and cold. Yesterday, it actually snowed! It didn't stick around in St. Andrews, but all day on the radio the BBC was discussing how some areas around Braemar and Spittal of Glenshee (yes, that's actually the name of an actual place in Scotland...) were going to see about 6 inches of snow, and the snow gates on the A93 were closed for some of the day.

Here's a photo I saw on the local news website of some sheep trudging through appreciable snow in Aberdeenshire.

David had to drive to Edinburgh at 5:00 am and said it was like driving to an early morning hockey tournament in Upstate New York! He was returning friends of ours to the Edinburgh airport for an early morning flight to London, after they have been visiting us this past week. They arrived last weekend, and since they have been to St. Andrews before as leaders of this study group, they know the town well and had a list of things they wanted to be sure to see. We all spent Saturday afternoon strolling through the streets, and Emma and her friend broke away from us to do their own shopping for a good bit of the afternoon. When the shops closed, we made our way to the Tesco to pick out some dinner...and we all agreed that their prepared Indian food is pretty much equally as good as what one can get in an Indian restaurant in our hometown. I'm not sure if that's more of a comment on the Tesco or the local Indian restaurant, but it's a fact.

We did take our friends to the Steak Barn in town, which is new since they have last been here. It's actually not a barn at all, but a huge stack of potato crates that have been fastened together into a surprisingly large building, with a kitchen at the back and huge communal tables sitting on a floor of dusty gravel. It's open only in the "spring" and "summer" here (though I'm not sure why, especially on a day like today!) and there are some small heaters and open fire pits inside. Still, it's definitely a place you want to visit with a warm coat!

The menu is a bit limited, and most of the folks inside are eating aged steaks on wooden platters with a mound of chips alongside. The girls struggled a bit to find something that wasn't meat-based to order, and in the end Emma asked the waitress if they could create something for her since she didn't like anything on the menu. They returned with a huge "burger" that had a thick slice of tomato in place of a burger. Aside from having some difficulty in figuring out how to eat it, she said it wasn't bad.

Since Emma and John had school this week, we weren't able to get too far from home with our visitors. They did meet Emma and her friends from school in town one day for lunch, and visited some of the cafes and parks on their own. When Emma and John came home from school on Monday, I took all the kids to the leisure center in Dundee for an hour in the pools and on the waterslides. We also had fish and chips for dinner one night (a must-do when visiting the UK...). On Wednesday, Emma and David went with them to Edinburgh on the train for some shopping and museum visits...and more cafes. I think David said he had had five cups of coffee by the time they left on the evening train to come home!

Butterflies and A Gruffalo

On Friday, David and I took Leah to the St. Andrews Botanical Garden for a visit. It's directly across from our house and down the Lade Braes path just a bit...it's so close that when you walk on the path and look across the stream you can see a good bit of the rock garden. Despite the proximity and my interest in gardening, I have never been. I'm not actually sure why...I guess it never made its way high enough on our list of must-dos for me to go. Also, the rest of the family isn't quite as jazzed at the prospect of a garden tour as I am, so I have never pushed it.

Now, though, the garden has a new butterfly garden: a greenhouse specifically created to house a huge collection of live butterflies. It costs a bit more to get into the greenhouse, and when we bought our tickets, they told us that entry was timed so that they could limit the number of people in the exhibit at once. Given the size of the place, I thought that was a bit odd, especially since we saw only one other small family in the exhibit the entire time we were there. Still, after poking around at the greenhouses nearby, waiting our turn, a volunteer let us in and gave us a brochure about all the butterflies we might see. The brochure had a photo of each, and a little checkmark box next to each. I told Leah that when she saw a butterfly, she was supposed to "tick off" the little box, much to David's great enjoyment. He added, "Let's take the orange that one is eating. That will really tick him off!"

The exhibit was amazing...there were butterflies everywhere. Leah was quite impressed, and found quite a number of the species listed on the brochure. David quickly started to note that it was quite hot in the greenhouse (he didn't appreciate it when, after saying, "Wow it's hot in here! What do you think the temperature inside this thing is?", I replied, "Oh, at least 30...maybe 31?") He lasted for a few minutes, then made a quick escape for some fresh air. Leah and I spent another 15 minutes inside, and after another mum with two small children showed up, Leah and the older girl circled each other for a bit, testing the other out for potential friend potential, and both of them lost interest in the butterflies all together. The volunteer tried to bring them around, exclaiming, "Ooh, look, here's a silverking shoemaker then!" but it didn't work. So, Leah and I left to find David sweating it out on a bench.

Outside, we walked towards the "Gruffalo Trail." This is a route meant for kids that follows the Julia Donaldson children's story The Gruffalo with carved characters from the story. We absolutely love that story...actually, we love all of Donaldson's books, and they are so popular here that the Waterstone's stores in Scotland carry versions that have been translated into Scots. ("A moose took a dauner through the deep, mirk widd. A tod saw the moose and the moose looked guid...") The trail leads through a wooded area, and ends at a huge redwood tree, underneath which stands a carved Gruffalo. This was a real hit for Leah, and after we found it, David had to leave to meet up with some students, but Leah and I kept walking the trail again and again to "find" the Gruffalo over and over.

After David's departure, I figured Leah would be ready to go as well, but she was quite happy to continue to meander through the rock garden and across the wee waterfalls.

Then, she actually asked to go back into the glasshouses, where there was another family trail...this one marked by a printed map that showed 12 fruits or vegetables growing in various areas of the world. There was a set of stickers alongside the map, and so when you found one of the plants in the glasshouse, you put the sticker on the map. Leah was enamoured of this idea from the start...they had her at the word "sticker!" So, she and I made our way through the glasshouses a second time! We also walked along the edge of a field, and at the end we found a small wooden gazebo hidden in the trees with a sign on it that said "Come in!" (so different from the United States...!). Inside was a backpack full of kids books and a big teddy bear. We spent some time reading the books and arranging, rearranging, and rearranging some more the teddy bear. Finally, it was well after noon and she started to look a little droopy, so I convinced her to trudge back to the car. On the way, we came across two older women who were reviewing their map. When they saw us, they asked if we knew how to find the Gruffalo. We assured them that we did indeed, and pointed them in the right direction. They noticed that Leah was really flagging at this point, and one of them said to her, "Oh, bless, ye swatch a wee wabbit!" I don't know enough Scots to know what she meant, though I could guess, but I am assuming she has one of those Scots translations of the Gruffalo at her house!

P.S. It turns out that Leah's nursery went to the garden on Wednesday of the following week! I didn't do a very good job of taking photos during our trip, so I was pleased to see that the school took quite a few, and Leah is in many of them. She's the one in the turquoise coat, hanging from the Gruffalo's neck!

Park Visit and Campus Visit

We are taking advantage of longer days (the sun sets at 8:30 pm now) and better weather (a top temperature of 12 today...you do the math!) by visiting the local Craigtoun Park, which is about ten minutes away from our house. Leah comes home from nursery around 6:00 pm each day, but that still gives us plenty of time to enjoy an hour or so on the slides, the nets and the in-ground trampolines (our favorite) before we go home for dinner. The park is quite beautiful, and there's almost never anyone there except us...and a few people walking their dogs around the lake. It's not terribly age-approriate for Leah, and most the equipment would never appear in a American playground because it's probably a bit risky. But, with John as her safety net, Leah isn't at all afraid to climb the chain link nets or the rope ladders. There are two impossibly tall and fast slides, and though on her first few trips down she emerged at the bottom with a look of sheer terror on her face, she quickly got used to them and now tackles them with surprising bravery for a two year old!

They even convinced me to give the trampoline a go!

On Tuesday, Emma and I attended an official campus visit at the University. Emma's a sophomore at home, so it's a bit early for this kind of thing. But I figured since we were here we might as well book one, to give her a sense of how these things usually go. We both know the campus buildings pretty well anyway, and we sort of know about the experience of being a student here from the things our Colgate students say, so we didn't intend to learn too much on the official tour. Also, these things are pretty much alike which ever campus you visit, and so all in all it was pretty predictable. Aside from the tagline "600 years of tradition," in the film , the campus tour could have been about any moderately-sized university in the United States, really. It seems that even the UK schools are entering into the cruise-ship-amenities rat race of college campuses, and so they included bits on the tour about their new sports centre ("amongst the best in Scotland," they said) and their redesigned and redecorated student union. Even St. Salvator's Quadrangle, one of the oldest parts of the university that features a chapel and cloisters built in 1450 (!), is freshly paved with a flagstone walkway that lists the names of major benefactors of the university. The tour guide marched our small tour group right there at the beginning of the tour and parked us over the names of those benefactors as she went through the list of opportunities that awaited prospective students.

Our tour group was made up of a family from England and two girls from New Zealand. The rest of the visitors were American. Our tour guide was Hungarian, and was in her last year at the university. As we walked with her, one of the American fathers asked her what it was about the university that made her decide to go there. She started to list the various social societies that were available to students, from the academic ones (the history society and the chemistry society) to the cultural (the drama society, the German society, the knitting society) to the wacky (the Harry Potter society or the society for those who appreciate cumulus clouds), and then she went on to describe the balls that were held by the various residence halls. She said she was majoring in international relations, and so she recognized the high quality of the IR program at St. Andrews and wanted to study under world-class researchers and teachers who could give her a good foundation for a career in international business someday. "Also," she added at the very end, "Since I'm from the EU, it's free for me to go here." That certainly left a big impression on all of us from the United States, as you can imagine!

In the end, we did have one small takeaway from the campus visit, and that was a better understanding of the differences between the curriculum in the UK university system and the American university system. At a typical American liberal arts university, a student is going to take about 4 classes each semester for eight semester, so about 32 classes in general. Of those, again in general, about one fourth of those classes are going to be related to the student's chosen major or concentration, while the rest are a part of some core requirements and possibly a minor or another major. In the UK, students actually apply to a specific program before they enroll, and then at least half and possibly more of their "modules" are taken in that program. There's no core curriculum, no distribution requirements, etc. In one's first year at St. Andrews, a student chooses three subjects to study so, using Emma and her current interests as an example, she would take a module on history, a module on French, and a module on geography. In year two, she would stick with all three of these, or she could drop either French or geography and add something like classics. In year three, she would take an honors module in history along with a module in French, but would have to drop both geography and classics at that point, and by the fourth year she would be studying only history. There are some variations possible on this, and the admissions counselor did present a scenario in which a student could change their intended subject of study after admissions, but it seems like a very difficult process. This means that students entering UK universities must have a pretty good idea of what they want to study before they apply.

I think Emma wasn't terribly enamoured of this idea, and she walked away saying she liked the American system of taking a bit of this with a bit of that along with a major. She did, however, like the UK emphasis on independent work, and their liberal use of the small-group tutorial model. She is enjoying the increased level of independence that she has at Madras College here in St. Andrews, and I think she sees the benefits of that. In fact, she actually has only one more week of school left here, because in early May all the S4, S5, and S6 students go on study leave to prepare for their National Highers exams which are given throughout May and early June. Emma is only able to take a few of the exams (a long story to be saved for another blog....), so she is enjoying the thought of lots of independent study, and lots of time in town with her friends!

Only Six Weeks to Go?!

We had an uneventful weekend around St. Andrews this weekend. After visitors and travel, I was a little low on energy and didn't want to do too much. John had a rugby fixture scheduled on Sunday afternoon that was two hours away, and I had been dreading that drive, so when I learned that the team was set to travel there by coach, I felt like I had been given the gift of a free day! The weather forecast was for cold temperatures for April, and a bit of sun, a bit of rain, a bit of cloud, and a bit of fog...all at the same time. Very British! So, with unpredictable weather on tap and a heap of laundry in the corner of each bedroom, we happily decided to stay home.

We did venture out a bit on Saturday morning...David and I went to town for a few hours in the various book shops and Emma and John took Leah to the playground, where she met a lovely boy named Archie, about which she is still talking. In the afternoon, I took John to the Morrison's grocery store. This was a trip that came about after a lengthy "discussion" at the dinner table on Friday night, and that "discussion" resulted from a quick run-in that we had had with John and some of his mates at the same grocery store on Friday afternoon. We had taken Leah there for a quick cup of tea (there's a lovely restaurant at the front of the grocery store with comfy couches and lots of windows), and as we were leaving, big groups of boys from Madras descended upon the store for their lunch, including John and his mate Saul, about whom we had heard much but hadn't met. Saul turned out to be a very handsome young Brad Pitt look-alike from New Zealand with a charming disposition, carrying a dozen jelly-filled donuts in a Morrison's shopping bag. We questioned them both about the donuts, and John was quick to assure us that they were Saul's, and Saul's alone. John's relationship with the truth in these situations has been a bit amorphous in previous instances, so I was a little skeptical.

John's school lunch, apparently

When John came home from school later that day, I noticed the outline of a soda bottle in his backpack and questioned him about it. At first he tried to hide the bottle, then fessed up to having bought it at the store, but insisted he wasn't planning to drink it. We launched into a "discussion" of this, and that "discussion" carried on into dinnertime. From that discussion, I learned that at lunch time, the usual practice is for John and all of his friends to put all their money into one pot on the way to the store, then run around the store gathering up as much soda and candy that they can, take it to a self-serve till, insert all of their money, then debit the soda and candy until the money is gone.  So, our discussion started out with a focus on healthy eating habits, but it then moved to issues of responsibility and ended with a long discussion of the importance of telling the truth. After a good few hours, it ended with John and me sitting alone at the kitchen table and ironing out a plan for how he was going to approach school lunch time in the future. The plan was a complicated one, but it did NOT involve our handing over £3 each morning with no questions asked about how it was spent, as we have been doing up to now. In any case, the Saturday afternoon trip to Morrison's was a bit of a recon mission for us, and was intended to help him figure out how to put his new lunch plan into practice.

On Sunday, we dropped John off at the rubgy pitch to meet up with his teammates for the coach ride to Aberdeen, then the rest of us took a quick drive to Dundee to do a bit of shopping. Leah is flirting with the notion of giving up her nappies in exchange for "pants" (FYI...don't make the mistake of using the word "pants" in the UK when you are actually referring to your trousers. Your story will take a very different and probably unintended turn if you do.) so we were in search of a cheap sheet of stickers to use as a reward for any "poo in the loo." On the Dundee high street, we found a "pound shop" that sold some decent stickers, along with a charity shop that had a number of good, used DVDs, so we walked away with a good collection for upcoming family movie nights. I also popped into the Marks and Spencer for a belt, which I neglected to bring from the US and have done without until now. As we walked down the high street, we happened upon the Disney store, which was promoting the Star Wars movies for some reason (pardon me for being out of the know on this, if there's some huge Star Wars movie coming out this weekend, etc.). In front of the store, there were two Storm-Trooper-like (again, pardon the ignorance on this score...) guys in front of the store, posing for photos and showing off their plastic light-saber-machine-gun-things (once again, pardon the...you get the idea.) Leah approached one with a bit of trepidation, and the Storm Trooper recognized this so offered his palm to her for a quick high five. She gave it, and then he, in that airy, halting, Storm Trooper voice, said to her, "Well done, Princess!" in a very Scottish accent. It was the first Scottish Storm Trooper I had ever heard! Leah was chuffed, and kept repeating all afternoon, "That sorm-sooper called me Princess!"

The rest of the evening was occupied with collecting John from his mates' house, gathering some leftovers for dinner, and putting away the now-cleaned pile of laundry. I had a few Skype meetings to conduct after bedtime (that's afternoon for you in the US, so a good time to set up meetings with students back at home), and when they were done, I had a quick look at our overall list of must-dos for our semester in Scotland. I realized with a bit of surprise that our remaining weekends here in Scotland are quickly diminishing, and we still have a very long list of things we want to do before we leave. This prompted me to count up our weekends, and I was devastated to realize that we have only six left! We have a weekend of travel planned with the students still, and two weekends that will include visitors, so after that, there's really not too much time left. I started to match up some plans for day trips with weekend days on the calendar, and before I got to the end of our list, I ran out of days. How sad! So, sometime this week I'm going to have to go through our list and prioritize what we really want to do and what we really, really want to do before we go, and start to make some cuts. Hopefully, they won't come off our list forever, but will just be moved to a list for a future trip to Scotland!

Emma's Birthday Trip to Paris

Last weekend, we took David's parents to the airport in Edinburgh for their return flight home, and Emma and I caught a flight to Paris a few hours later. A trip to Paris had been her birthday gift in February, and since we had Hamilton friends who were spending the semester in Paris, we jumped at the chance to combine a visit to them with a celebration of Emma's "Sweet Sixteen". For the last few weeks, Emma and I have been planning our itinerary and making our list of must-dos, and at last it was time to start crossing them off our list!

At the top of Emma's list was a climb up the towers of the Cathédrale Notre Dame. On Emma's first visit to Paris, the towers were closed because of a labor strike, and last year they were closed because of the post-Charlie Hebdo vigipirate system. This time, they were open, though we did have to stand in line in the rain for about an hour before we were allowed to ascend the steps. The climb wasn't bad, and the views were beautiful. Emma enjoyed framing photos of Paris with the gargoyles atop the towers with her phone camera. We also made a quick visit to Sainte-Chapelle while we were in the same area. This wasn't on Emma's list, but I didn't think it was right to allow her to visit Paris three times without seeing it. That chapel, built by King Louis IX to house his collection of Passion relics, is a stunning building, but to me requires a good bit of research before a visit to appreciate it appropriately. We bought a small guide book as we entered and that allowed us to "read along" with the stained glass windows as they moved from the creation story to Revelations, but we still couldn't do such a grand building justice with a short visit. That one will go back on my list-for-next-time!

Emma had also requested that we do a fair bit of shopping on this trip. She prefers the big French retail clothing shops along the Rue de Rivoli like Promod and Pimkie, while I like the small places in the Marais. We spent Sunday afternoon browsing in the Marais, but so did 75% of the population of Paris, so it was a bit crowded and didn't turn out to be as relaxing and leisurely as we had hoped. Our friends, with whom we were staying, did take us into Mariage Frères in the Marais, an amazing gem of a tea shop that I had always wanted to visit but was too intimidated to attempt. My friend had been there before, and as a result she just breezed in, approached the counter with confidence and started a conversation with the monsieur in the formal white apron. After a brief consultation, he began to open the various large, black bins of tea, cocked them towards her and waved his hand over the top to push some of the scent from the tea towards her for her approval. It was the most grand production I have ever seen over a product that was going to cost about €9 in the end!

We also stopped into a shop called Merci, which was one of those designer housewares/clothes/book/garden/furniture shops that offers exceptionally well-curated and high end products for sale, and gives most of the profits back to a charity. It's clearly run by someone with impeccable taste and deep pockets...I can't imagine how they can pay the rent on their three-story double-storefront shop in the heart of the Marais, let alone return the profits to charity, if they didn't have some kind of substantial funding somewhere in the background. Though we were unlikely to buy anything, we still had a grand time shopping. I was tempted by a unique gardening implement that looked like a hand-forged spork, but couldn't justify the €60 price for what amounted to a small shovel. Still, it was lovely. The entire shop was a gem, and I'm also putting it at the top of my list for subsequent return trips to Paris, if only to have the chance to order a café allongé in their elegant book space (below).

We also managed to get in some seriously wonderful food shopping on this trip. Our friends took us to a lovely fromagerie that was literally steps away from their apartment on the Rue de Bretagne, and there we ordered some petits ronds de chèvre and tried, for the first time, a life-changing Comté. We consumed every inch of it, along with a fresh baguette traditione and some clementines, sitting on a park bench at the nearby Square du Temple. Later, the daughter convinced her mother to take us to Aux Merveilleux, a glitzy pastry shop filled with decadent little puffs called merveilleux and recognizable for the line that flows out the door all day long. Here, we chose between mounds of meringue merveilleux with names like l'incroyable (meringue and cream on speculoos biscuit with shaved white chocolate on top), le magnifique (same, but with praline cream topped with carmelized hazelnut) and l'excentrique (cherry whipped cream coated with crystallized cherry meringue). I had the original merveilleux, but it was still vraiment magnifique!

Emma's list also included a stop at the famous Shakespeare and Company English-language bookshop along the Seine, which we did. We actually spent several hours here, but she just couldn't find a book that she wanted. When you buy a book here, they stamp it with the Shakespeare and Company logo, and I think she just couldn't settle on a book that was stamp-worthy enough! We did also visit the bookstore in the BHV department store, and there she did find a vegan cookbook to bring back to her French teacher back home. I found a few books that were tempting as well, but for me nothing was worth the weight of adding another book to our return luggage.

Since my friend and I are avid gardeners, we did manage to sneak in a few garden stops as well. She knew some wonderful spots that were hidden away in obscure corners of the Marais, and since my last two trips to Paris have been in January, it was lovely to be able to see gardens with something in bloom. The Jardin de Luxembourg was a special treat, as it was full of tulips and other spring-flowering bulbs. Since Hamilton has a worrysome number of deer living in close proximity to my gardens, the tulip is a long-forgotten treat for me, and I fully enjoyed browsing the tulip beds and taking lots and lots of photos!

Emma wasn't terribly interested in the gardens, but she WAS very excited to return to Versailles. This is, of course, a gardener's dream, but Emma was more interested in seeing some of the ancillary buildings on the estate that we hadn't seen before, including the Grand and Petit Trianon. These were small chateaux built at one side of the estate by Louis XV for his mistresses. The Petit Trianon was given, by Louis XV's grandson Louix XVI, to his bride Marie Antoinette. Marie apparently escaped to the Petit Trianon to hide from the responsibilities of being a queen, but even that didn't offer enough of a reprise from formal court life. So, she ordered up the construction of a hamlet next door, complete with a mill, a dairy, a farm, and a meadow with a lake in the middle. The main house was covered in scaffolding during our visit, as it is undergoing restoration, but the rest of the hamlet offers a lovely place to stroll. We toured both Trianons and their substantial gardens, along with the hamlet in its entirety.

We also crossed off another item on Emma's list by renting bikes, and we used those to tour the impressive grounds of the entire grounds of the Versailles chateau.  It's an enormous place, and not too many visitors are able to make it too far past the start of the Grand Canal, so we had most of the place to ourselves as we rode. Emma was in heaven!

While we were at the Grand Canal, we stopped for a quick lunch at a canal-size cafe. We ordered salads and pizzas, and were enjoying the view of families rowing boats on the canal, when a très French woman sat down next to us with a little terrier dog in tow. A waiter hurried over to the woman, and she had a short conversation with him, then sat back to enjoy the sunshine, paying no mind to her dog. The dog was a bit agitated, and started to bark at the other diners around him. She ignored him, and when he got too loud she gave him a quick jerk on his leash and hissed "tais-toi!" My friend turned to me and expressed dismay that the French don't seem to give their dogs any water when they are in public. She was concerned that the dog was thirsty, sitting in the sun, and I could tell that she wanted to fill up the little glass ashtray on our table and hand it over to him. To avoid giving offense to the woman, however, she forced herself not to intervene. So, we continued to sit there and eat our lunch in silence as the dog's barks turned to wimpers. At last, she said, "I can't take it anymore!" just as the dog's leash became intertwined in the chair legs next to him. My friend jumped up at the same time that neighboring diners also decided to intervene, and as a team they managed to untangle the dog. The dog owner leaned forward and gave them her thanks, and that was encouragement enough for my friend, who filled the ashtray with water and put it on the floor next to the dog. At that exact moment, however, the waiter arrived with a large plate filled with a frothy, cream-topped pastry, along with a second plate that was empty. As my friend watched, the woman cut the pastry in half, slid part of it over to the empty plate, and presented it to her dog. The dog, ignoring the ashtray of water, dove nose-first into the mound of cream. My friend quickly sat down, leaned over, and whispered, "Well, now we know that Parisian dogs aren't deprived after all...and we also know why French women don't get fat!"

All in all, it was a lovely trip to Paris, and I'm so pleased that Emma now has such memories of her 16th birthday. I'm hoping that it will instill in her a life-long love of the city of Paris...if only to ensure that I have someone to bring along with me who loves the city as much as I do on future visits. And, if nothing else, perhaps it will entice her to stick with studying French for just a bit longer!

Day Two on Isle of Skye

We have been home for a day now, and we're unpacked and sorted from our short trip to Skye. The second day was a little less eventful than the first...mostly because of the driving rain that came down in sheets all day long. We had a slow start to the morning, and at one point after Emma and I left the cottage to mail some letters at the wee Post Office down the road, we ventured off to an especially lonely section of the island where I was going to let her try to drive on the road for the first time. Though she is sixteen, she doesn't yet have her permit in the U.S., and since the driving age is 18 in the UK, she is way too young to drive here, so that's a problem. The whole drive-on-the-left-from-the-right thing is another complicating factor, but still I was willing to entertain the idea on such a remote island. In the end, though, we both chickened out because the single track road system seems to complicate things, and because the rain created some poor visibility. We left the experience of driving on the road for the first time for a later date in our semester in Scotland, and went home to collect the rest of the family.

We were staying in a holiday cottage in Dunvegan, on the western side of the island. This map below shows only the top half of the Isle of Skye, but aside from the trip out and the trip back, we didn't spend much time in the bottom half.

On the first day, our hike to the Coral Beach took us just a few minutes north of Dunvegan. In this photo you can see the tiny island at the tip of the peninsula between Dunvegan Head and Waternish Point.

On day two, we drove east to Portree, which is the largest town on Skye (about the same population as our hometown of Hamilton, NY). We stopped at a bakery/cafe/art studio (this seems to be a common hybrid on Skye) for "lunch" though the menu was pretty limited and mostly involved sweet baked goods. I'm a bit of a lightweight when it comes to car travel on especially windy, curvy roads, so I wasn't going to be able to endure a scone with jam for lunch, followed by a driving tour of the island. I opted for a black coffee instead. Leah and John, who have stomachs of steel at this point in their lives, each (happily) had a chocolate chip cookie the size of their heads for lunch.

We drove through the harbor of Portree, which is known for its colorful shops and houses (see photo below), then started up the eastern side of the Trotternish Peninsula towards the Storr.

The "Old Man of Storr" hike is one of the many well-known hikes on the island, and it is also one of the shorter ones so I figured it would be good for toddlers. As we unloaded ourselves and our rain gear from the car, the wind started to blow and the rain started to fall. David's parents headed up the hill just ahead of us, and David said he was going to stay back at the car because he suddenly wasn't feeling so well (author's note: he DID have a scone with jam for lunch!). As Leah and John and I started up the trail, David's parents were already on their way down, saying it was way too windy and cold for them. The three of us persevered nonetheless, stopping a few times to readjust our rain gear as the weather got nastier the higher we climbed.

Here are the kids towards the beginning of the hike:

And here they are 20 minutes later, at the first summit:

Doesn't this look fun!?

At this point, we decided to cut the hike short, and we all basically ran the whole way down the hill to the car, where David and his parents were waiting.

We drove north to see the rest of the Trotternish peninsula, and I had a number of sites and short hikes on the day's itinerary in the unpronounceable Kilmaluag and Uig, but with David not feeling well and the weather not cooperating, we decided to cut things short and see what we could by car. Emma and I jumped out at one point, at Kilt Rock, to see the waterfalls, but it was too misty to see much so we just came away with a foggy selfie as evidence that we were there!

By the time we returned home, a few hours later, we were all a little dejected, soggy and car sick. We were also a little low on gas, but there was a small gas station in Dunvegan and I figured that I would drive past it and just go home, since we would need to pass it the next morning on our way out of town. We made it back to the cottage, ate leftovers for dinner, and David and I finished off a bottle of wine while the kids took advantage of the XBox that was set up for guests.

The next morning we packed up and loaded the car, and set off. We stopped in the town to let Emma post some postcards, and David swung in to the gas station. All the unleaded pumps were covered with plastic bags, though, so he went in to ask how to fill up. He came out a few minutes later and said to me that it seemed that they weren't going to have any gas until mid-day. We really didn't want to hang around until mid-day in such a tiny place in a packed-to-the-gills car, so we took reassurance in the indicator on the car dashboard that said we had a 23 mile gas range. We drove off, south, towards the Skye bridge because we knew there were a number of small towns along the way. As we drove, though, the gas range kept dropping and dropping, and a few miles out of town it dropped to 13 miles. At that point, we pulled off the road to use our phones to locate a gas station nearby. Our phones had no service, so we used the GPS on the car instead. It said the nearest petrol station was in Broadford...39 miles away. This was no good! Though we had been discussing this predicament in a hushed voice so as not to alarm the kids or grandparents in the back, they were by now fully aware of our pickle! We reviewed the map and decided that the closest town was Carbost, which we had passed through the day before to buy some scallops for dinner. It was 13 miles away, and the GPS didn't indicate there was a gas station there. I asked the kids if they remembered seeing a gas pump while we were there, but no one could recall one way or the other. We didn't have much of a choice, though, and decided that it would be better to run out of gas three miles from a tiny town than three miles from absolutely nowhere. So, off we went, and David took advantage of every downward slope to put the car in neutral and save on gas. It was completely silent in the car at this point...everyone's eyes were scanning the horizon for signs to Carbost while checking the gas range on the dashboard. At last, the gas range went to zero but the car kept going. After what felt like an eternity, we limped into Carbost. As we rolled into the little post office/souvenir shop/grocery store (this also seems to be a common hybrid on Skye!) we spotted a rusty old gas pump. In the United States, this thing would have been the decor outside a Cracker Barrel meant to evoke images of Americana, but here I was hoping it was the real deal. David popped into the shop and asked if it worked, and he came back out with a huge thumbs up! We were never so happy to pay crazy-inflated island gas prices in our life!

Here's a shot of our saviour gas station! Trust me...it looks MUCH better in a rearview mirror!

First Trip to Isle of Skye

Thought the Isle of Skye is one of the most-often visited islands in Scotland, and seen by people who have only been to Scotland for a week, we have never been. It's a looong drive from St. Andrews to Skye on windy roads all the way across the country, and Skye is a very large island and quite built up by Hebridean standards. So, we have always assumed we wouldn't like it, and have gone to the smaller islands like Arran and Iona instead. But, since David's parents are visiting and our kids are on a two-week school break,  we felt that it was probably a good thing to give them all the chance to see the island. So, here we are!

The drive itself was a bit of a slog, and it was raining for most of the day. Still, it did give David's parents a chance to see some of the Highland landscape, along with Ben Nevis and the Great Glen through the car windows. Once we passed the Spean Bridge and turned north, the landscape turned positively eerie-- all the trees were completely coated with a bright green growth that looked like foam. It was so striking that Emma and I read about it online as we drove--it turns out that it's lichen, and folks in the Highland are very serious about preserving it. I assumed it was hurting or killing the trees on which it was growing, so it was a relief to see that it does no damage...it just looks creepy!

Skye is accessible by a bridge, so the end of our drive didn't require a ferry trip. We stopped just before the bridge for some groceries and a toilet break, then crossed to the island. Once you cross the bridge, arrive on the island and pass through an uninspiring port town, the scenery changes dramatically. The road narrows and turns to single-track with passing places located periodically along the side. David was driving but I could tell it feels a bit like driving 50 mph on a golf cart track!

We have rented a small house in Dunvegan, which is on the northwest side of the island. It took about another hour, after crossing the bridge, to get there. It's nicely located near some good hikes and the main town of Portree, but still remote enough. There's a coral beach about 10 minutes north of our house, and we made that our first stop. It involved a wee hike to get there, and the rain made the trail a bit mucky, but by the time we reached the beach the clouds had cleared and the sun came out. This made the water turn aquamarine blue, and it did look a bit like the Caribbean, though it was much colder!

I took these photos with my phone, by the way. I have a much bigger and better collection of photos, but no way to upload them here, so I will have to save those for a "Skye recap."

After playing on the "beach" for a bit, we got back in the car and headed south for a well-known hike called the Fairy Pools. This is a short walk through the moor and along a body of water that falls through the rock and forms a series of clear blue pools. Apparently, it makes for some good "wild swimming" spots in fairer weather, but I can't attest to that first-hand. Way too cold! It was lovely, though. The water runs off the Cuillin ridge, which is what you see in the photo above, which we took from the car park at the trail head. The mountain in the back is Sgùrr nan Gillean and is one of the eleven "Munros" on the Cuillin ridge. 

The hike was a bit rocky, but reasonable enough for Leah. When she got tired, John put her on his shoulders and pretended to be a horse, which caused her to scream with glee! We got quite a few amused nods from passers-by as we walked!

We stopped at an oyster shed on the way home to buy some fresh seafood for dinner. The conversation we had with the woman shucking oysters there was thoroughly confusing, probably due to our opening question about the price per pound, which is a unit of currency to her while a unit of measure to us. We came away with a huge bag of fresh scallops on ice, and stopped at the next "town" for a bit of butter, which we purchased from the smallest "store" I have ever entered. As we drove home, the sun was going down over the hills, and we did stop a few times to let some sheep pass in front of our car and took some photos, so I will share those soon as well!

Edinburgh for David's Birthday

We took a short trip to Edinburgh on Friday for David's birthday, and to give David's parents a chance to see the city for the first time. We arrived by train from St. Andrews, and stayed in the same hotel we used when we took students in January. We arrived mid-afternoon and settled into the hotel, then spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around the walls of Edinburgh Castle.

John and Leah on the train across the Firth of Forth on the way to Edinburgh.

David with the kids and his parents in front of Edinburgh Castle.

Leah chasing yet another pigeon in the castle. The collective population of Scottish pigeons is going to breathe a huge sign of relief when we board that U.S. bound plane in June!

Couldn't pass up this photo opp!  I wonder how much longer these are going to be a familiar site in the UK?

We spent a few hours at the castle, and were actually one of the last groups to leave. It was a lovely time of day to visit, because the castle along with most other tourist sites in the UK have just switched to their summer hours, meaning they are open until 6:00 pm. The weather isn't yet terribly summery, however, and though it stays light until well past 6:00 pm, those last few hours of the day can get quite chilly, so any tourists who are in town have retreated to a nearby pub on the Royal Mile at this point in the day. Therefore, we pretty much had the whole place to ourselves. 

It had rained before we arrived, and so the benches along the castle walls were full of fat droplets of water. Leah was passing the time waiting for her Nonni and Emma to emerge from seeing the Crown Jewels by swishing her hands through the droplets, making a complete mess of her coat and her trousers. A wee Spanish boy who was on a leash-like lead held at one end by his mother thought this looked like an excellent past-time, and he came over and joined in. His mother wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea and she tried to dissuade him from getting wet. He was determined, though, and once Leah realized that she had a fan, she really started to smack the droplets with her hand with as much force as possible. This made the little boy laugh with glee, and made his mother tighten her hold on that leash to keep him clear of the flying water. I felt bad for her, and since Leah was now quite soaked, I decided to bring an end to her fun by picking her up. She was not happy at all about this, and had a rare, full-blown, top-of-lungs, boots-flailing, back-arching tantrum as I carried her away. Thankfully, the castle was quite empty at this point, so the witnesses to this display were few in number!

Fortunately, my secret weapon for ending bad behavior was close at hand: John. He can almost always draw Leah out of a tantrum, either by quickly engaging her in some other questionably-appropriate activity, or by out-shouting her until she loses interest in making her voice heard. In this case, he suggested that he take her down into the castle prisons, and when she stopped crying and agreed, we all thankfully followed them. I stepped away for a few minutes to give my nerves a bit of a break, and I headed to one of the whisky shops in the castle. I was in search of a specific kind of whisky for my brother-in-law, but also hoping that they were still giving out free samples. No such luck, alas, as they were closing up the till and had put away all the samples by the time I got there (though I did get there just in time to buy the gift!)

When we were shooed out of the castle at last, we walked down the Royal Mile to the closest Pizza Express, where I had made a reservation for dinner. Pizza Express is a ubiquitous part of modern-day British culture...one can't travel too far in the UK these days without coming upon one. It's a moderately sophisticated chain that serves individual, thin-crust Neapolitan-style pizza along with some Italian foods like antipasto and risotto, but also some menu "innovations" like Hawaiian pizza that would make an Italian shudder. The beauty of Pizza Express is that the restaurants are clean and centrally located and they have both an excellent three-course kids meal and a good wine list, ensuring that the kids are fed over a long enough period of time to keep them occupied while the adults can finish a 150ml glass of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo!

Leah digging into her Bambino meal at Pizza Express. 

Not only do they give kids a gelato at the end of the meal, but they serve it with a wee cup of warm milk dusted with cocoa powder called a bambinoccino! 

The next day, David and John set out to hike Arthur's Seat, and David's parents took Emma to the Palace of Holyroodhouse for a tour. Leah wasn't up for either of these, so after dropping everyone off at their appropriate spot, I walked Leah back up the Royal Mile.

Leah and John just before the boys started their hike up Arthur's Seat (in the background).

 I stopped at the lovely (and free!) Museum of Childhood on the Royal Mile, which is a great place to take kids. It has three floors full of toys from yesteryear, all safely encased in glass curios, and activity centers in the middle of the room for the kids to explore. Leah found a wooden parking garage on one floor and played for a few minutes on her own. After a bit, another boy came over to see what she had, and I nodded my head towards him to indicate to her that she should share with him. She eyed him warily, then extended one of the trucks in his direction. "You want a lorry?" she asked, with a decent British lilt in her voice. The boy said "sure" and took it with a shrug, and I could tell he was American. He played on his own for a bit, and Leah continued with what she was doing, but at one point she started to describe how her "lorries" were going up the "lift." After a bit, she lost interest and moved on to a puppet theatre across the room. She went around the back and spent some time getting the puppets on her hands, and while she was behind the curtain, the American boy came over and sat in front, as if he were waiting for the show to start. A second boy joined him, possibly assuming that something was about to happen, and so I quickly got out my camera. After a bit, Leah opened the curtains, and her face registered immediate shock to see that an audience had gathered. I was really hoping that she was going to muster up a bit of a puppet show in a British accent, but she kind of froze when she saw those two boys sitting there, and just managed a weak smile before running off!

 After the climb and the palace tour, we all met back up again at a little cafe we had found the last time we were in Edinburgh. It's just far enough off the Royal Mile not to be too attractive to tourists, and so it's a pretty quiet place. There are huge couches and big windows inside, and the cafe features something for everyone: baskets full of books for toddlers, filled rolls (John), free wifi (Emma), illy coffee (me), chocolate cake (Nonni and Poppi) and a Christian bookstore next door for David!

We hunkered down in the cafe for an hour, then walked to New Town (as opposed to Old Town Edinburgh, with the Royal Mile). New Town is a Georgian showcase of well-planned streets and elegant gardens...a distinct difference from the narrow, windy, cobbled streets of Old Town. New Town is usually a lovely place to spend an afternoon, but since the afternoon was turning out to be a windy, cold affair, we only made it as far as the first Primark before giving up and ducking inside for a bit of shopping. Poor John has worn through the three pairs of non-school-uniform trousers he brought from the States, so I forced him to pick out a few pairs and try them on in a dressing room. For John, this is akin to having a tooth pulled, and so I was thoroughly thankful to have grandparents along to keep the other two occupied long enough to take care of this unpleasantness. We managed to find three pairs that were suitable in about 10 minutes, and so he and David moved on to the Waterstone's next door while I gathered a new pair of pajamas for Leah (her toes are literally busting through the seams of the footies we brought from home) and paid for the whole lot at the till.

We had just an hour or so before we needed to head towards the train station, so we agreed to yield to Emma's request to have dinner at yet another British chain called Yo Sushi. This is one of those places where pre-made sushi winds its way through the restaurant on a tiny conveyor belt that passes by each table, on colored plates that signify the item's price. There's also a little doorbell-like button on each table that you can press to call over a waiter and order bowls of soup, udon, or tempura. You take what you want, and at the end of the meal, the waiter counts up all the different-colored bowls and brings you a bill. It was a fun concept, and Emma and John were seated next to the conveyor belt so they had a grand time serving the table.

Our "bill" at the end of the meal!

 After dinner, we walked back to the train station and caught our 7:30pm train back to St. Andrews. There weren't many other people making this journey out of Edinburgh just as the weekend began, so we had a train car almost to ourselves. John had bought Leah a little pail of play sand at the Primark while he was suffering the trouser-shopping, so she was quite happy to have a table seat to ourselves to spread out her castle-building equipment!