Scotland 2009

This year we took ourselves off to Scotland for our summer holiday. It reminded me of home: grass, trees, sheep, and it rained a lot! The people were really friendly, even when it took a minute or so to realise that they were speaking English even though I couldn't understand much of it :-)














We started off in Edinburgh, which we liked. The highlight for us was the Camera Obscura museum which has loads of sciency gimmicks. Not exactly traditional Scottish entertainment, but lots of fun for the whole family - and here we are below, in infrared:


From Edinburgh we drove out to North Berwick, where there's a beach - an exciting novelty now that we live almost as far as it's possible to live from the sea in England. They also run Seabird Safaris where you travel on a jetboat out to Bass Rock, which is the world's largest gannet colony. We saw puffins and a seal too.

Then we spent a week in a cottage on the Carmichael estate in Lanarkshire.

It was close to Tinto Hill, which Mike and our friend Alison climbed one day. Apparently you can see for miles on a good day, but not the day they did it!

We also visited the town of Peebles nearby, and the world heritage site at New Lanark where you learn about life in the 19th century cotton mills. One day we took the car ferry across to the Isle of Arran - a big adventure!

And now we're ready to exchange the walking boots for some heavy lifting as we move into our new house. Watch this space...

Summer 2009 - playing in Bow Brickhill

Earlier in the summer (back in June) we had some glorious weather and spent a lot of time playing around the village. Luke's been learning to ride his bike without training wheels:

and we have a good swing on a tree in the woods:

plus the playground is still good value.