Scotland: Day 3

Our second day at the cabins was an uber-active one. I didn’t take too many photos that day because I wasn’t man enough to haul my camera bag around. I started the day with another dose of Weetabix…mmm…

After breakfast, we went down to the main office to rent bicycles. It was a nice, sunny day – perfect day to be out and about. I was a little nervous about hopping on a bike since I hadn’t been on one that wasn’t stationary since I was maybe 11. I couldn’t keep my balance very well with my camera bag so I had to dump it back at the cabin. Boo on that since that meant I couldn’t take any pictures of the painful inclines and curves I encountered during the bike ride (Yeah, I’m a baby. So what.) We pedaled our way to the tiny little town of Strathyre and encountered some Highland cows, sheep, and some scary, curvy dirt paths – crappy to walk a bike up through and really terrifying to ride a bike down through.

The bike route we took into Strathyre.

Once we finally did make it to Strathyre, I was dying of thirst so we stopped and the first market we saw and bought some refreshing sparkling water. After we all cooled down, we walked our bikes over to a little old inn called the Munro Inn. It was a rickety little place that had absolutely no patrons that we saw. I ordered my first scone – a fruit scone, and Christian ordered a plain one. It was deeeeeeeelish. The cream, the jam… so yummy. We also shared some garlic potato wedge – also surprisingly yummy. The innkeeper appeared a bit shifty and rickety… much like the inn. He was a skinny, lanky older man who needed to scrub his fingernails. Nice guy though, I guess. Once we were done with our mid-afternoon snack, we headed off to a nearby playground (they call it a play park); we couldn’t resist the tire swing (though I didn’t play on it).

We started heading back and decided to stop at the nearby stream to skip some stones and race some branches. Super-simple fun (even though I really suck at skipping stones). Keith decided to take his shoes and socks off and test out the water. That was pretty funny considering the water was ice-cold, he jumped out as fast as he jumped in.

Once we got our fill of stone skipping and freezing, we rode back. Christian swallowed a bug (second one he’s swallowed in his lifetime). We retrned the bikes and headed back to our cabin. Everyone went to rest and I was still hyped up on energy despite the embarassingly painful bike ride, so I decided to go on a lone mini-hike and take some photos. When I came back, Stefania and Christian were up and decided they wanted to go on a walk to, so I was all for it! We took the short walk down to the loch (Loch Lubnaig as mentioned in my previous post) and took some pictures.

Christian & Stefania

We made pasta with red sauce and roasted veggies for dinner. No dessert on this night, but we were pretty full off of pasta (had tons of leftovers). After dinner, we dove into some more episodes of Supernatural (yay!) and played with the Wii. While we were watching Supernatural, I heard loud shuffling outside on our balcony (I sat right next to the window). Our visitor was none other than the Pine Marten! The critter came to pick up the peanuts we left for him/her. Christian pulled out his camera and snapped some so-so pictures of it. It was so dark and scurried away as soon as we opened the door. Oh well. Still neat that it visited us though. We were told that it was a frequent visitor of cabin 26, but no one else ever really reported seeing it anywhere else. So yay us!

I’m able to blog about each day we spent in Scotland post-trip because I kept detailed notes on what happened each day (a journal of sorts but with bullet points). The last two bullet points I listed for day 3 were:

• The showers have no water pressure (it’s true – took forever to wash soap off).
• Keith is a bit sick – the bike ride did his asthma no good

Scotland Day 2: St. Patrick’s Day

I’m a bit backlogged, but here’s a recap of day 2 of our Scotland trip.

After a long and eventful day one of traveling and sight seeing (I missed mentioning the crazy Yew tree we went to see before heading to the Forestry Commission yesterday – see pic at the bottom of this blog post), Christian and I decided to sleep in for 12 hours before starting day two. His sister Stefania lives in 2 bedroom flat with her roommate Catherine, but they also have a box room (not allowed to call it a bedroom because it doesn’t have a window – true story). Stefania placed a blow-up king sized air bed in there and it turned into a great guest room, so we took full advantage and slept as much as we could. Once we finally did get up, we had some Weetabix cereal. This is something I have not seen in the U.S. and I wish we had it because it was really tasty and healthy. We had the Weetabix Mini Chocolate Crisps. Mmmm… Mr. Weetabix, please export your Minibix Chocolate Mini Crisps straight to California, thanks.

After breakfast, we all packed up Keith’s car with our duffels, Keith’s bag of technology (consists of Wii, controllers, and media box filled with tons of shows and movies) and enough food to prepare meals for our 4-day (3 days, really) cabin stay. We headed up through the little town of Callander to our cabin in Strathyre (on the edge of Strathyre, I imagine… the place was somewhere between Callander and Strathyre). We checked in at the main office and drove over to our cabin – cabin #25. It was beautiful. There was a bedroom and bathroom downstairs as well as upstairs. We claimed the downstairs one that had two twin beds separated in the room, so we tried to push them together to make a nice king-sized one. The kitchen was stocked with silverware, glassware, cookware, and a little fridge. The balcony was very large – enough room for two round tables and 4 chairs at each table (they were out there, but we didn’t use them). We had a great view of Loch (lake) Lubnaig. We were yards away from the loch; it was awesome. The weather was beautiful and the water was incredibly still. The Loch was like a large, long mirror that reflected the mountains on the other side of us and the bright blue sky above us. It felt pretty unreal to be out there in the middle of so much natural beauty.

Our cabin – #25

The inside of the cabin

Loch Lubnaig

We decided to sign up for a night hike later that evening, so we headed to Callander to shop for some flashlights (they call them torches). We parked by Callander Meadows and took in the sights and then walked into a few shops and looked around. Once we found our torches and hit a few other little stores, we headed back towards the cabins. We stopped along the way to visit Hamish the Highland cow. Hamish was huge.

The night hike was a light to moderate hike with a few slight inclines and two painful sets of stone steps. Our guide was one of the park rangers (Ranger Will) and was uber-knowledgeable about the surrounding plants and animals. He taught us about the Pine Marten, which is a ferret-like animal that eats grey squirrels (remember the Pine Marten for next few blogs). He pulled a few sprigs of pine and put them in a thermos of hot water to brew us some pine needle tea. Apparently, you can brew tea out of almost any thing out in that forest. He also told us about these red mushrooms with white spots (you may remember them from Super Mario) called the Fly Agaric which I found to be super-interesting. These mushrooms are highly poisonous and psychoactive. According to Will, the Santa Claus with flying reindeer story stems from hallucinations as a result of accidental consumption of this fungus. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer is also tied to these fungi because deer can safely consume the Fly Agaric and they actually turn their noses red after consumption. The deer that consume these mushrooms filtered out the poisons but their pee still contained the hallucinogenic chemicals, so people would take advantage of this during the winter and eat yellow snow to get their highs. Weird, kinda gross, but neat, right? The overall hike was about 3 miles. Towards the end of the hike, we hooted and listened for owls, had sonar sensors to listen for bats, (zippo results for both), and played a bit with our night vision. Once the hike was over, we all headed back to the main office and tried out some of that pine needle tea that Will made earlier in the hike. It smelled really nice, tasted a little weird, but totally worth trying. We walked away with a bucket of peanuts to bring back to our cabin to see if we could lure a Pine Marten over to our cabin.

Once we got back to our cabin, we put some peanuts out on one of the plastic tables on our balcony and then had dinner. We had salmon with garlic & onion, roasted mixed veggies, and Cadbury eggs that we picked up from the store earlier that day. We also pigged out on Winegums. These are gummy, fruit-flavored candies that are a cross between Swedish Fish and Jujy Fruits, I think. They’re really good and I wish we had them here in the U.S.

Peanuts on the table for the Pine Marten

After dinner, we relaxed on the couches and watched “Superbad” and an episode of “Supernatural.” I crocheted while watching these and managed to finish the cupcake scarf that I started working on just before we left.

And that, my friends, was the end of day 2 (you see why I’ve taken so long to blog about the trip???)

Pics from Day 1:

Ginormous Yew Tree

Deep-fried Mars Bar

Rosslyn Chapel Under Construction

Irish Dancing

View of Edinburgh Castle from the street

Scotland – quickie update

I haven’t been able to make much time to blog about the trip as I go like I was hoping to… Boo on me for that. It’s just been busy and by the time I get on for some quality internet time, it’s 1 AM here (like right now).

We went to Arthur’s Seat today. It’s a really high hill in the center of Edinburgh that provides an amazing panoramic view of the city. Unfortunately, the weather’s been the coldest it’s been since we’ve been here (we were pretty spoiled with warm weather) and the wind decided to pick up a LOT while we were about mid way up the hill. It’s a little bit of a steep climb, so having the wind try to blow me off the rocks as I was climbing up was a tad scary. I didn’t think I would last, but I made it to the top of the peak and was abused by wind and pellets of rain for a few minutes while Christian and I sat on the monument up there. It was a little scary trying to move around and get into position to take pictures. Climbing down was also freaky since the rocks were kind of slippery from the rain that knocked us around. Christian and I had to brace each other at one point in order to take some quick pictures. Sounds ridiculous, but it was pretty wild wind.

Lots more to write about from today, but I think I will just have to do a detailed blog of each day when I get back.

Scotland: Day 1

Christian and I headed to SFO Sunday morning and checked in at the United Airlines desk to kick start our Scotland trip (thank you Gregg for getting us there)! Our United clerk, Ms. Kristina San Pedro, was THE nicest airline worker we have EVER encountered. She was so chipper and friendly; I completely appreciated her for contributing to a great start to our vacation.

I was pretty nervous while waiting in line to get through security, simply because this was my first trip out of the country. Everything went fine though and we had plenty of time to spare. We decided to grab a little bit of food from “Deli Up Cafe.” Christian thinks it’s a play on “belly Up” but who would want to name their business with a play on those words???

After my very so-so salad, we went to wait patiently for our plane to board. Turned out to be the longest line ever once we got up to get on the plane. Our seats were in the last row of the plane by the restrooms (which turned out to be pretty okay – no stench and lines weren’t annoying). I was on the aisle and Christian was one seat in. Each seat had movie screens on the back and a channel guide of movies and shows. It ended up being that only two channels would work for me, so I watched “Changeling” (which was very good, by the way) and “Twilight” (turned out to be a bit fluffy and over dramatic, but still glad I saw it). At two  points during the flight, they served us Morocco Chicken, salad, veggies, and an oatmeal chewie as one meal and turkey sandwich with cheese and yogurt.  I crocheted some, listened to music some, tried to sleep some (but failed miserably at it). My back was killing me by 3/4 of the way into the trip and I couldn’t wait to get up and about.

We landed in Heathrow at around 7 and had to go through customs (was pretty nervous about that and no one there was exactly friendly). We then went through security AGAIN – that was annoying. Once we were all cleared and arrived at our gate, we took the opportunity to make our first purchase with the British pound by purchasing water and orange juice.

We ended up being in line behind an old American couple while boarding the connecting flight from Heathrow to Edinburgh.  They were a bit funny like old couples can be, but the wife TOTALLY reminded me of Clark Kent.  She was wearing a bright red long-sleeve top and uber-bright blue pants.  Either she is a very proud American citizen who wanted to display her pride for all others to see, or she  was a closet Superman freak.  I vote for the latter since it had potential to be so much more interesting of the a story.

I was finally able to fall asleep for about 20-30 minutes in to the connecting flight, but that really wasn’t a whole  lot of rest that I could have taken advantage of.  Oh well.  On a side note, it’s 830 PM Scotland time as I draft this post, and I’m nodding off a bit and losing track of where I am, so pardon me if I stop making sense at some point or miss something… All right, back to connecting flight.  It was nice and sunny in London (would have been great for photos) and then became uber-foggy as we headed into Edinburgh.  We landed a bit early and had our baggage claimed a ready to go pretty early on.  We had never offiicially discussed the specifics of our pick-up with Christian’s sister Stefania (aside from agreeing that she and her boyfriend would pick us up), so we weren’t sure whether the default thing to do was to sit in the baggable area team and wait, or find a spot curbside and wait.  We figured the easier thing for them to do was to pick up curbside, so we went with that guess. After doing a sweep of baggage claim (in case they were in there somewhere)  We waited for almost half an hour before her boyfriend came out and got us.

Ooops for not connecting better about that tidbit of info.

We went back to her place, dropped stuff off, (no elevators, btw) and stopped by her Forestry Commission Office to check the place out and meet the people.  Appparently, the Forestry commission has a guy in their lunch room that makes deep fried Mars Bars.  MMmmmm they were good.  And so bad for me.  After meeting her co-workers and getting a tour of the office and greenhouses, we decided to head to the Rosslyn Chapel since we were in the neighborgood.  For those who are unfamiliar with “The Da Vinci Code,” the chapel is the setting for a pivotal plot point in the book.  We were a bit disappointed when we got there.  There was construction all over the place and admission into the mid-constructed/restored chapel was more than we were willing to pay, PLUS they didn’t allow picture taking once inside the chapel.  It would have been awesome to have seen the chapel closer than we already were, but it just wasn’t meant to be.

Once we were done sneaking around the perimeters of Rosslyn Chapel to get peeks of the building, we went on our merry way to Costco.  That’s right.  We went to Costco in Scotland.  We’re heading up to a cabin by a lake for the rest of the week, so the  Costco shopping trip was for food for all of us while we’re up there.  Christian and I each bought a hot dog and coke (even though he gave his sister his soda cup – sacrifices for lent).  Stefania ordered this thing called a “jacket potato” which was basically a baked potato topped with stuff.  She got one topped with Tuna.  Yeah, I thought it was a hair weird too.

Once done, we stopped by Stefania’s boyfriend’s (Keith) flat in order to pick up his Wii to take with us while we are up in the cabin.  Boy, we sure know  how to have a good time, huh.

Once we dropped all of the Costco groceries back at Stefania’s place, we headed out to a local bar that was featuring Irish dancers (one of which is one of Stefania’s good friends and former flatmate).

The performance was fun!  Once that was over, we headed out, took a few photos of the castle near the bars, and then taxied back to the apartment.

I can’t believe I managed to get through all of this.  Some of it may not make sense…  So sorry about that.  I’ll edit the post to include pictures from the day – I just need to rest now *yawn*  Hope to post again in a few days if not sooner.

Work Dreams

I’ve been off of work for less than a day and have already kick-started my vacation with a work dream! WTH! This wasn’t even a dream about me simply being at work. No, this was a dream about me sitting with someone at their desk helping them to troubleshoot manually building a 954×60 ad because our systems wouldn’t let the ad built the right way be scheduled. I dreamed HTML! Talk about uber-nerd.

Scotland, Here We Come!

Headed to Scotland on Sunday… it’s my first time out of the country (I can’t count Ensenada and Catalina, Mexico – I just can’t). So excited! I’ll try to post photos and/or blog while I’m there, but we’ll see what happens…

Inspired by WonderCon 2009

I stopped by many booths at WonderCon in SF today. Lots of cute and creative things up on display and for sale. Cute fleece hats and creature ears were popular this year. I was intrigued by one booth that was selling pairs of furry clip-on cat ears for $10. They were all hand-made by the lady running the booth and her mother. I really wanted a pair… wasn’t sure what I’d do with it, but they were really cute. I decided to study the ears and make my own. Just so happens I have fur, felt, and a pair of hair clips in stock at home. So I made these guys:

Cute, no? I might even be brave enough to wear them to the Con tomorrow