Blurry.
Like the Puddle of Mudd song Blurry said..”Everything’s so Blurry”
Very true.
To be fair, the kids slept on our trip we did on the east coast, and because they were well rested they hardly slept on the plane ride across the pond. We arrived early AM and with very little sleep in the last 24 to 48 hours. This would have to be one of the most sleepless I’ve been in my entire life.
I remember landing – it was early. 7am-ish… I don’t recall much about going through the airport, other than the fact that we got our passports stamped. Then we waited outside in what felt like frigid weather for what felt like forever for our car rental place to pick us up. They were very slow, in fact, I think we waited for a little over an hour for them to come. Then when we got to the car rental place we had to wait in a long line. There was no bathroom in the shop and Arabella let us know she really needed to go. She ended up peeing her pants as she couldn’t hold back anymore and there were no bathrooms to be found. Poor kid. We got her changed, finally got into the rental, and started on our way. We were going to be traveling from London Heathrow up to Inverness for some cute little bed and breakfast (roughly a little over 560 miles). We made it all the way to Milngavie (a little north of Glasgow) before we had to stop. It was not a joke either. I was having a super hard time staying awake while driving, and like that picture of entering Scotland, that is how the day feels. Just a blur, passing by quickly.
I know that come the night time I was really struggling. I knew that with it taking another few hours to get to our destination we wouldn’t be able to do it. We called my parents and asked them to look for a place to sleep. We found Premier Inn (pronounced Primer inn by Arabella and lovingly named that ever since). We were talking to them via google voice and VOIP. It allowed for a free call without any additional charges. After we booked a room we made our way over. We stopped, ready to get out and tired as ever. Maryia went into the hotel and started check-in. She quickly came out and let me know that we were at the wrong location. They had two Premier Inns in the area and it was on the other side of the area.
Got everyone loaded back into the car and made our way over.
So we finally got inside the hotel at close to 8:30 pm local time (which is about 12:30 noon US east coast time, and 9:30 am west coast time (just to give an idea of how long it was since we had slept).
We went to sleep and got up the next day at 4:30 am as we were behind schedule by about 2 to 3 hours and needed to make up the time.
Where to next? Well, we wanted to see some castles, as well as visit Loch Ness. Epic. Yes, we were still tired but thankfully a little bit on the mend after that last experience. We didn’t stray off of the roads much as we had packed as much as humanly possible into our trip. You can see this in the fact that we had McDonalds.
Side note: they serve porridge at Mcdonald’s in the UK.
In retrospect, we actually planned far too much. Early to Mid-trip, we decided to nix a good portion of everything we were trying to see and only tried to see the most desired of things. Even with the slimmed-down list, we didn’t see everything as planned.
Pictures!
We visited Urquhart castle. Read more about it here. It sits right beside Loch Ness and couldn’t be a better way to kick things off.
One final photo from the castle is seen below of Arabella who found a little section that she called her size and demanded a photo near. A little drafty but the size works for her.
Stopped to see the Lockerbie memorial, had a brief tour of Manchester, and visited historical sites along the way (when possible). Fun story – there was a tunnel that our GPS took to into to get to the Leasowe castle. Anyway, it was a toll tunnel which we didn’t realize until it was too late. We stopped at the gates – they asked for whatever the charge was. I explained we were from the USA and didn’t have the money. We could pay with a credit card if needed but didn’t have any local currency. After pausing for a moment, the guy told us to enjoy our stay here and that we could pass with no charge. Everyone says people from the UK are rude or whatnot and that just wasn’t our experience.
We then went to stay the night in Leasowe Castle which is also a hotel. We had breakfast at the Castle and continued to make our way down.
We will finish this post off with two photos of Arabella. One was where we were walking the streets of Mancheter as night was upon us – there were little pop-up Christmas shops everywhere and she posed for a photo off in a side area with some crunchy leaves that had fallen (those are the best kind). The other one is what she had drawn during our stay in the Castle (of the Loch Ness monster of course).
just Pray
note: this post was published on 08/03/22 but moved the publish date back to the middle of December 2017 to keep chronological order.
