On to Scotland!

Okay, picking up just a few hours later! I called an Uber to come pick us up at 4 am and then we had the lovely pleasure of finding out at checkout that the Caledonian Sleeper card had been rejected and we had to pay for the rooms ourselves, which the CS people had been very firm about us NOT doing. Ugh! Thankfully they were really great about reimbursements and we had a refund for the train tickets when we woke up and then had payments for the airfare, hotel rooms, and various Ubers about a week later. 

Anyway, we got to Heathrow and we were absolutely hammered. Like so so so out of it and exhausted and truly not in full possession of our faculties. The absolutely lovely Heathrow staff probably took one look at us and took pity on us, waved us to the front of the line to check our bags, then opened up a new security lane for us, and then the very nice security people chatted with me while going through whatever one of our bags had flagged in security and told us where the best bathrooms and cafes were and gave us some insider hints about finding really comfy waiting chairs. Over and over throughout our trip we were so impressed by how the general attitude of everyone we encountered was an immediate move to make things as convenient as possible for families with children--a huge contrast to the U.S. where it often feels like you're being punished for having children (coming back through customs was a complete nightmare, but at least we had the lovely Heathrow people to balance it out). 




We boarded the teeniest tiniest most adorable jet and some of our train friends from the night before were also on board, so that was fun to chat with them! I'm so glad that my new Australian friend (whose name I can't remember) had asked me what I thought about trying to get flights instead of trains, because I never would have come up with that in my exhausted state but it worked out so well! 

We landed in Inverness just an hour later, only ten minutes behind our original timetable for arriving on the Caledonian Sleeper. 

And got our bags from this very teeny baggage claim thing (why can I not remember the name of it, it's like the exhaustion of that moment returned when I started writing about it!).

And our good luck in things coming together to make the best of a bad situation continued--we were at the airport so we didn't have to take a train or Uber the 20 minutes from the train station in Inverness to the airport to get our rental car, and then our rental car was the BEST and I loved it so much and I want one here. It was a VW van and it just had a gazillion amazing features but best of all it was so, so so, roomy. Which was much appreciated after the doll-sized Mercedes we had in the Cotswolds. 

My sister had told me that we absolutely had to watch Outlander before we came, so when we saw the standing stones near the Clava Cairns, obviously had to strike this pose. 

Thankfully everyone stayed firmly in 2026. 

Then we went over to Culloden Moor and walked around the battlefield. It's one thing to read about the English charging from the high ground while the Jacobites ran through the bog; it's another thing entirely to walk over it and see how horrible the position of the Jacobites actually was. 

The battlefield is dotted with these stones that roughly correspond to the mass graves of that particular clan (MacIntosh in the photo above, Fraser below). Around 1,600 men died in a single hour at Culloden, with the Jacobites accounting for about 1,500 of those deaths.  

Then we grabbed some supplies in Inverness (this sounds much faster than it actually was, but I was pretty proud of my makeshift cooler with giant reusable grocery bags and a couple bags of ice) and started our drive towards Skye in a driving rainstorm which was great because all the boys immediately fell asleep. 

We stopped at Eilean Donan castle in the downpour and went in with Matthew and Isaac (Luke and Nathan stayed in the car asleep) to grab some treats and when we came out, the sun was out and the rain was gone! 

Then we drove on towards Skye and headed straight for the trail to the Old Man of Storr. 

I cannot possibly overstate how windy it was--so so so blustery and the strongest wind I'd ever felt until a day later, haha. When we initially got out of the car we all got right back in and put on basically every layer possible. In the photo below I had 4 shirts/sweaters on under my puffer jacket and raincoat, and two pairs of pants under my rain pants, and I was STILL cold. 

But it was an incredibly beautiful hike and my heart was so full of happiness and gratitude that everything had worked out so that we could actually be on Skye that day. 

It alternated between rain and blue skies as we hiked up and then switched to glorious radiant sunlight as we got to the highest viewpoint. 

So gorgeous and such a fantastic hike. 

On the way back we came around the loop behind the Storr and it was really gorgeous and only had a handful of people on the trail. 

Absolute heaven. We had originally planned to grab dinner in Portree but we were all tired enough that we decided earlier in Inverness to just get stuff we could eat at our lodging that night, so this was the only glimpse we had of Portree (which is fine, I was there to hike!). 

When we got back in the car it started raining again and we drove past this gorgeous misty vista out over Uig Bay from the parking lot of our lodging, which was essentially a very glorified hostel and I LOVED it. So comfortable, so clean, and attention to every single detail; I wish we could always stay at places like that! 

There was a giant kitchen and lots of people making food that smelled incredibly delicious as they chattered in a dozen languages, but we had microwaved chicken tikka masala bowls, haha! 

We ate and showered and tumbled into bed sooooo happy to be ending that very long day! 

 

London day 3: Changing of the Guard, Shakespeare’s Globe

Taking a break from incredibly draining work stuff (this summer session has been...crazy, and I just found out today that somebody in the business office messed up on payroll so I've been dealing with that alongside actual work) to talk about our most exhausting day in London! Let's jump right in, shall we? 



Started the day off with a nice long run! Neil ran with me for a couple of miles and then I ran another hour or so by myself. I think I ended up with 10 miles that morning? 

I was running up to Regent's Park and realized if I altered my route just a tad I could go by 221B Baker Street so of course I did so. 

Then around the park--I was hoping I'd have time to go up to Primrose Hill but I looked at my watch and realized I needed to book it back. 

Where I had a very delicious clotted cream and jam friend awaiting me! 

We packed up and checked out of hotel and then practically RAN over to watch the changing of the guard. Thanks to advance research, we knew where to be to watch approximately 8 different guard groups go by, which was really fun (if slightly exhausting racing back and forth across the park). 

Then we walked through Hyde Park and watched the waterfowl for awhile. 

We decided to have a picnic lunch by the Victoria Embankment gardens before hopping on the tube to get to our next destination, which was quite a bit farther down the Thames. 

This is where the day started getting pretty exhausting--we got on the tube and it just didn't go. Finally after about ten minutes they announced that it would not be running due to something something something that we couldn't hear. We had tickets to see a 2 pm play at Shakespeare's Globe, which was something I was SO excited about, and at this point we were a 38-minute walk away from a show starting in 30 minutes which we had planned to arrive at 20 minutes early. 

The next 25 minutes or so were noooooot fun (it was quite hot!) as we absolutely raced on foot to the Globe, but we made it before the play began, even if we didn't have the view I was hoping to get. (I really wanted to be front row so we could lean on the stage.) I had gotten groundling tickets since they're way cheaper and I didn't know if the kids would want to see the whole play, etc. and that way I wouldn't be too grumpy if we ended up leaving early. In hindsight, I don't know why I thought we would leave early because Nathan and Matthew love plays, but...oh well. 

No photos allowed during the show, but we saw the MOST spectacular performance of Romeo & Juliet. It was so, so, so good. So incredibly well done, such great staging choices (I especially liked how they played the final scene in a morgue with Romeo & Juliet surrounded by the bodies of everyone who had died earlier in the play) and with the added entertainment of the Capulets and Montagues as biker gangs, so there were tons of BMX bike tricks on stage (including hopping over Mercutio's corpse). Lots of using smartphones and Instagram posts and streaming things to really modernize it (and realizing that yes, people might be livestreaming Mercutio's death, or posting on Instagram about how sad they were to see Romeo banished, etc.). Just super engaging and so so so well done. 

We had watched the Baz Luhrman Romeo & Juliet film a month or so before we left so that the younger kids would be very clear about what was going on, and then we saw &Juliet last week, so it's been a fun summer of Shakespeare interpretations, haha! 

Then we walked back along the Thames to the Tate Modern. We were kind of killing time here because we needed to grab our bags from our hotel but we didn't want to get our bags until we were ready to go to the train station. This was not a very fun interlude since there was a Picasso exhibit that Matthew REALLY wanted to go to (he is very into Picasso right now) but it was 15 pounds per person and nobody else wanted to go, so...we didn't end up going. Anyway, everyone was hot and very tired from the sprinting across the park all morning followed by the mad dash to the Globe followed by standing for 2 hours watching the play, and not into modern art at the moment. 

Eventually we decided to eat an early dinner and just go hang out in the lounge at the train station. 

We had tickets on the Caledonian Sleeper going from London to Inverness, and I was so so so so so excited about this. I had booked us into the first-class cabins which meant that we also had lounge access. I was a little bummed when our train was switched from Euston station to Kings Cross, because the Caledonian Sleeper has a dedicated lounge at Euston, but we were able to get access to the first-class lounge at Kings Cross, which was quite nice. 

But then our train was delayed an hour...and another hour...and another. There's only so long you can sit in the lounge reading on your Kindle, so Matty and I went to go do some exploring. 

And Nathan made another trip with the kids to go buy some candy. 

Then they announced that the first-class lounge was closing and the Caledonian Sleeper was still at least an hour out, so everyone had to go back into the terminal and just wait. At this point it was 10:30 PM or so and we were REALLY tired. 

We had lots of time to do an impromptu photoshoot (they take away the luggage trolley at around 10 PM, just FYI) as we waited. And waited some more. 

Finally at around midnight one of the people I'd been chatting with in the lounge earlier told me that she had heard the Caledonian Sleeper employees talking and they were saying the train was cancelled completely. All the first-class passengers were basically sitting in the same waiting area since we had all left the lounge at once, and word spread quickly so we all went over to talk to the CS people, who told us that yes the train was cancelled and that we could come back at 6 am the next day to get another train, which was a slower train but would get us into Inverness about 5 pm. I was so so so frustrated because we only had a couple of days in Scotland and this was basically burning one. So then we managed to talk the CS people into approving flights instead of train fare, and I booked some extremely expensive flights leaving 7 hours later, and we went to an extremely extremely extremely overpriced hotel where we got in at 1 am to find that two of the rooms had no air conditioning. Poor Nathan pretty much broke down at this point; he was really stressed from the first train delay and the boiling-hot room was the last straw. It was such an awful night and we had to get up at 3:30 AM to get back to Heathrow. Oh man. I don't know that I've ever had such an exhausting day, and remember I started it with a 10-mile run! 

The reason I keep mentioning that we were in the first-class lounge and talking with other first-class passengers is that all of this happened before any of the CS employees made it downstairs to talk to anyone else on the train. So literally everyone who did not have a first-class ticket was still waiting for information & didn't even know the train was cancelled until well after we were on our way to the hotel with flights booked for the next morning. As I have no other experience with first-class passenger treatment, I thought that was...interesting.