More Museums

July 6
science-dinosurs

This was another somewhat relaxed day,but this time it was raining. Hank was ecstatic at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, as they house an old WWII RAF SPITFIRE, his favorite as well as one of the most famous WWII planes on earth. There were other great things too, like some skeletons of dinosaurs, as well as art stuff. The dinosaurs,as well as other prehistoric animals were really interesting to us, beacause none of us had seen a skeleton of one before.There was also an art gallery that was on exhibition was called Alasdair Gray. Alasdair Gray was born in December 1934 and this would have been his 80th birthday, which is pretty cool. To us the paintings seemed like a bunch of grumpy old men. but the other visitors seemed to enjoy and appreciate them more than we did. After our long adventure in Glasgow we were very hungry so we ventured from the Galloway to Glasgow. There we ate at KoolBa, one of Glasgow's Premier Indian Restaurants This gave us a break from Scottish food but not from their culture as there is often live music and shows in Glasgow. We enjoyed the band for at least an hour before returning to the hotel and going bed after a long day.

horses and hiking

july 5
nature-walks and horse rides

Our night at the Brookford B&B was pretty great. It was a cosy little place with an amazing view of the scottish countryside. With yesterday being a very relaxed, laid back day, we had lots of energy to go to the Galloway Forest Park, the largest forest park in Britain.  There were so many things we could do there, including hiking, biking, horse riding, and just taking in the wonderful scenery. One of the cool things we did was go to the Red Deer Range. It made it possible for us as well as other people to see the around 60 red deer that live in the wild. After lunch at a cafe, went for a walk in the forest, the views were absolutely spectacular. The trail we went on was  the Kirroughtree trail. It was as generally walk, nothing too adventurous, although there were some pretty serious hiking trails that were available. We ended our trip to the park with horse riding, which is always a fun thing to do. your view of everything is so much better when you can see it atop a horse.

Books & B&B

July 4th Our third day in Scotland! We woke up at 8 today, we've pretty much adjusted to the time zone here. After we ate breakfast at the Novotel hotel, we went to the National Library of Scotland. Usually we’re not one for books, but just being in the National Library, the world’s leading center in study of Scots, we spent hours in there. After learning about Scotland history and reading regular old fashioned fantasy books, we returned to the hotel to eat lunch and we checked out at about 1 P.M. We arrived at Brookford B&B at about 3:30pm and after we checked in we just relaxed at the inn. At about 5 we left to go eat at the Clachan Inn, and although it is an inn it had an amazing restaurant with delicious food.Brookford B&B

Third [day's] a charm!

3 July 2015

Today was the second day of Edinburgh, Scotland, the third day of the trip. We have sort of adjusted to the jet lag and we left the hotel early this morning, We then headed out to the Edinburgh Zoo which was only about 2 miles away from the hotel. The zoo had a lot of cute animals like koalas and pandas and they even had penguins! This Zoo is the only one that had koalas and panda bears in the entire UK. There were also a lot of colorful fish and they even had the smallest of animals, leafcutter ants. After eating lunch in the zoo, we explored the city some more before we returned to the hotel.

Scotland take 2- Castles and Haggis!

2 July 2015
traditional meal-Haggis
history-stone of destiny

Ah, our first day in Scotland. At 7:15am, we were finally able to stretch our legs once we got off the plane. Once we got our rental car around 8, we had a quick drive over to the Novotel Edinburgh Park hotel and checked in, and we had breakfast at a cute cafe in Edinburgh. We then drove to the Edinburgh Castle to take the morning tour. We learned about over 400 years of scottish war history, and we also saw the Stone of Destiny. The name makes it sound like a big beautiful gem or something fancy like that, but it's really just a red sandstone block. The cool part is is that it was used in the coronation of the Monarchs of Scotland for centuries. Edinburgh castle is also is the military headquarters of the UK army in Scotland.  After our tour, we had lunch in Redcoat Cafe, which is in the castle. All of the meals and goodies smelled oh-so-good! at exactly 1 o clock, we watched and heard the one o'clock gun, which fired just outside the cafe. it was originally used to tell ships the time out at seaAround one we left the castle and went to to explore Edinburgh city. We visited the National Museum of Scotland and saw many cool things. My personal favorite was the t-rex skeleton in the animal hall. For dinner we went and tried one of scotland's special dishes, Haggis. Basically, for this meal, the chef shoves onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, stock, sheep innards, and a few other things into the lining of an animals stomach and boils it for a  few hours. If you didn't know what it was made of, you would probably think it wasn't that bad. Some people say it tasted like spicy oatmeal to them, and it went great with the neeps and tatties, (Scots for turnip and potato). After that, we went back to our rooms in the Novotel Edinburgh Park hotel and we all had an amazing night's sleep.  Our first day of Scotland was definitely as amazing as we all thought it would be, and we can’t wait for the rest of our trip.

This is a picture of our meal of haggis, we loved how professional it looked when plated!

Day 1- Off to Scotland!.

1 July 2015

Today, Hallie, Chris, Hank and I (Caitlin) left for our trip to Scotland! Just about our whole first day was plane travel. We did however have a very long layover time, almost twelve hours, in New York City . Since we all had to get up super early to catch our 6am flight, we spent the first few hours sleeping in the airport. (Not the best place to sleep, but we needed it!) After that, we went out and had an amazing breakfast at The Good Fork, a highly rated restaurant. We then explored Times Square as well as other parts of the city, and had a typical NYC lunch from a hotdog stand.  After lunch we split up, girls and guys, to do our own things. We met back up a few hours before our continuing flight took off and went back through airport security. Once all that madness was over, we had a semi-nutritious, not-so-delicious meal from a airport food stand. On our second flight, which was about seven hours, we had the occasional snack break of cookies, peanuts, or pretzels, catching up on sleep in between, because when we landed, it was time to start day two, our first day in Scotland!! (itinerary, hotels, and miscellaneous are included below)

Itinerary, Hotels, and Expenses