Scotland in 31 pictures

Yes, we tried to pare down our pictures, and we were still left with 31. Everything was just too beautiful and memorable to cut out!

First of all, let's just say that Ben's parents are the best Scotland tour guides ever! They are SO passionate about everything related to Scotland - the history, the people, and the splendor of the landscape. They are so good with the details too. When we arrived, I felt like they had been bottling up a huge world of Scotland wisdom for 6 months, and they just couldn't wait to pour it all out on us. They did, and we enjoyed it completely!

This is a water tower in a park area just down the street from their flat in Edinburgh. We went here the night we got there for a walk. Just begin to take in all the different shades of green. Scotland has more shades than we do, I think.

Dad at his desk in the camera room. They are serving as Church missionaries at the Royal Archives of Scotland. Ben's dad takes digital images of these giant volumes of family history-related text.

And Mom does quality control on her computer here. Kind of monotonous work, but very important. They love the fact that they get to work with other couples to keep them company.

Scott Monument in Edinburgh. We climbed to the top for an amazing view of the city.

Here is the view of Edinburgh castle from the monument.

Ben and his ultimate hero, Adam Smith, the father of economics. Who knew Smith was a Scot?

At Edinburgh castle

The George Heriot School, which is supposedly the school J.K. Rowling patterned Hogwarts after. Did you know that the Harry Potter books were also "born" in Scotland? Rowling wrote the earlier books in the series while sitting in a cafe in Edinburgh.

This is "Scott's View." The Scots have three big heros: Robert the Bruce (a great soldier and king), William Wallace (another warrior, more on him below), and Sir Walter Scott, the author of Ivanhoe and other great novels. This was Sir Walter's favorite view of Scotland, and he stopped to look out on it each time he passed.

Dryburgh Abbey, or the ruins thereof. Aside from the incredible architecture and beautiful setting, Dryburgh is the burial place of Sir Walter Scott. Too bad the English destroyed all of the abbeys in their rush to get rid of the Catholic church...so Henry VIII could marry another wife!

Between Dryburgh and Melrose Abbey, we learned about the monks who lived in them and how they devoted their lives entirely to God.

Melrose Abbey. Here we took a great audio tour and got all geared up for watching Cadfael movies that night, based on the Ellis Peters novels.

Abbotsford. This is Sir Walter Scott's amazing home. We all LOVED this tour and loved learning about the history of this great Scottish author. Not only was the house amazing, but Scott was something of a collector, so in his house are displayed all kinds of amazing artifacts, including a breastplate from the battle of Waterloo, a lock of Mary Queen of Scots' hair, and Napoleon's writing tablet. We wish that everyone could have listened to our tour guide with his Scottish brogue quoting some lines from Sir Walter Scott and telling of his deep love for his country.

These flowers were on the grounds of his home. Ben's mom loves the flowers of Scotland almost as much as she loves the history (okay, so I'm not sure about this fact. It would definitely be a close one).

My favorite picture from our trip. We are standing in front of the lovely River Tweed in a cute little town called Peebles ("Peebles on Tweed," to be precise).

The devoted missionaries (and returned missionary) in front of the beautiful mission home.

Luss. This is the darling town where we went to visit Loch Lomond. A perfect place for a Sunday stroll.

This is Loch Lomond. Don't you dare call it a lake; not in Scotland. And that mountain in the background is Ben Lomond. Just for you, Dad (hail, BLHS).

And there we are at the Loch, in front of some very bonnie banks.

Scone Palace (say "scoon"). This is where all of the Scottish monarchs were crowned up until they merged with England (under James I). Tradition had it that they would sit on the "stone of destiny" or "stone of scone" to be crowned here. Unfortunately, the English stole the stone in 1296 and took it to Westminster Abbey, where the English monarchs would sit on the stone to be crowned. It was finally returned in 1996, and is now at Edinburgh Castle, along with the Scottish Crown Jewels. To our surprise, it's just a plain old stone. But the Scots love it! Anyway, a Duke still lives in this palace, and it was great place to tour.

Ben is just waiting for his turn to be crowned.

More of Scone Palace

Taken from the car window in attempt to document the amazing views as we drove through Scotland. We spent several hours in the car, just relishing the scenery. Too bad this picture doesn't even do it justice. It was SO much greener in real life. I swear, I didn't see ANY dirt while we were in Scotland. Only green, green, green, everywhere.

Stirling Castle.

The Royal Couple, Ben & Jenn. Some people have weddings in the "Great Hall" the castle. That would have been cool . . .

Looking over the walls of the castle. I couldn't take a picture to show how magnificent this castle looks from below.

But this one shows how the castle is built on top of this extremely steep cliff. Makes it pretty hard to attack...

And this is a view from the castle.

And another.

And this is the best picture I could get of Stirling Castle from below. It is quite the sight from miles around. And this picture perfectly shows the cows ("coos") in the fields below!

Ready to fight with William Wallace and the rest of them (of Braveheart fame) at the Wallace Monument. Wallace's greatest victory was defending Stirling Castle and especially Stirling Bridge, which was the only passageway from the lowlands to the highlands. This monument is one hill over from Stirling Castle.

We could have stayed a lot longer in Scotland, but we got a great taste of it while we were there. Thanks Mom and Dad for being great hosts and tour guides!

York for a Day

After London, we took a train and headed to York. We wanted to stop somewhere in Northern England, and York seemed to be the perfect in between point. We stayed in a lovely bed & breakfast (The Bronte House). It was nice to have a day to relax after some pretty intense touring in London.

York is a beautiful city, the center of which is enclosed by Medieval walls. Here I am standing outside the walls.

And then walking along the edge of the walls, which offers a nice view of the city and the River Ouse.

We took a "Ghost Hunt" tour, which was pretty fun, but not as historical as we were expecting it to be. Mostly it was just funny. This guy picked on me as the girl he would flirt with in a slightly creepy way throughout the tour. Don't worry, Brittany; Ben was close by with his ax, just in case.

York turns out to be a lovely place just to wander around . . .

. . . and shop. Ben allowed me the pleasure of shopping somewhat aimlessly on Thursday morning. Halfway through the morning, I figured out the mission of our shopping trip -- to find the perfect Wellies for me. Mission accomplished! And we managed to buy a few more keepsakes along the way.

I couldn't be more excited about this find! The boys got other souvenirs, so they are okay with this one being just for a decoration. If you go here, you will realize why this will look perfect sitting on the bookshelf in their bedroom.

Wellies! The other perfect souvenir from England. I am giddy about these!!!

York Minster. An incredible church with amazing stained glass and lots of great history (all of the details which I have probably forgotten, unfortunately. If you have questions, ask Ben; he remembers everything).

We had a grand tour of the inside of the Minster.

We finished off our trip to York with some absolutely delicious Cornish Pasties, which are basically meat and potato hand pies (pasty, unfortunately, rhymes with nasty, not tasty; I just found that out after returning home. Darn!). Still, a great way to end our little detour in York.

4 Days in London

I have often dreamed of visiting the United Kingdom with Ben, but I honestly never thought it would happen in this decade. Somehow, the stars aligned this spring, and it just seemed like the perfect time for us to take such a wonderfully indulgent trip. So, we closed our eyes, opened our wallets, and went for it!

First item of business, visit London. Show Ben all of the things I fell in love with during my semester abroad in 2002.

Here I am at the BYU London Center: 27 Palace Court. 8 years older, and wiser too.

The Orangerie at Kensington Gardens (my old jogging territory)

Kensington Palace

Royal Albert Hall

Serpentine River, dividing Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park

Buckingham Palace

We randomly happened to be on Birdcage Walk when people started gathering along the sides of the road. Soon we heard drums, and then this procession of important looking British people happened. Not sure what it was all about (parade commemorating new guards?), but it seemed like the quintessential London moment!

Big Ben and Little Ben (he lost 15 lbs. before leaving on this trip!)

The Houses of Parliament

Westminster Abbey. We did the audio tour here and loved it. SO much history has happened and been commemorated in this one building.

We didn't get a picture, but after Westminster Abbey we went to the Imperial War Rooms and Churchill Museum, which was incredible. Seeing the bunker from which Churchill directed the UK's forces in WWII really made the war seem so real to us.

And just one more Big Ben picture (we took about 10 throughout the trip)

This phone booth was just begging us to use it for a photo op.

Ben at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Here's what I love: Trafalgar Square minus the pigeons (thanks to a recent city ordinance not to feed them); a whirlwind trip through the National Gallery to see only the best paintings (not my favorite way, but we had lots to see); the fact that all of the London museums and galleries are FREE to the public.

Classic photo of Big Ben on the Thames, taken by Ben. Yes, I know that "Big Ben" actually refers to the bell within the tower, not actually the clock tower. I'm counting on you using your X-ray goggles to see the bell. :)

View of Tower Bridge from our river cruise on the way to Greenwich.

Ben straddling the Prime Meridian in Greenwich. I remembered thinking of Ben the entire time I was at Greenwich (just a little side area of London) 8 years ago. I just kept thinking that this was a place he would be fascinated with and would love to see. And was I right? Yes. We both loved it. It is the home of the Royal Observatory where the problem of determining one's longitude while at sea was first tackled. They have a great (free!) museum about how the problem was actually solved in two different ways--once by using complicated star maps (made at the Observatory) and another by using extremely accurate time pieces, which are on display there. Very cool.

The red ball on the top of the Royal Observatory drops daily at 1:00, a sign by which sailors have set their clocks for centuries.

Tower of London. We did the classic Beefeater tour and loved it.

London Bridge. I just had to take a picture because it's not a very fancy bridge for all the hype it gets. Why don't we sing about Tower Bridge falling down?

Millennium Bridge, on the other hand, is pretty spectacular. Don't worry -- we watched out for dementors as we walked across on our way to the Globe.

We saw Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. It was pretty gruesome and a bit disturbing, but we enjoy it (you all know how Ben likes his bloodshed). Notice the black sheet coming out from the stage. I think this is something new they did specifically for this play. The groundlings in the standing room only section had to stand under this sheet, poking their heads up through little holes. It was so funny to see their heads popping out! Then they had larger slits in the sheet, and throughout the play scary things (like bloody bodies) would pop up out of these slits and reach for the groundlings' heads. There were also lots of bloody bodies popping up out of trap doors in the stage. Yeah . . . so . . . I guess they have to come up with something different to do after showing Shakespeare plays in the same theatre for several hundreds of years.

We would like to thank the Stephensons, our good friends from NJ, for making our trip to London possible. They now live in London, and they opened their house to us (Emma gave up her suite on the top floor for us) and let us stay. We had a great time getting to see them again! On Wednesday we spent the morning going to their neighborhood park, which happens to be this really amazing park that is used as a setting for period films and such. Above are the 4 Stephenson kids heading to the park.

And here we are at Chiswick House, built during the reign of George II as a summer home for some important guy (Lord Burlington?). We took a tour of the house with the kids and enjoyed Magnum bars while the kids played a bit in the park. It was the perfect end to our stay in London.

Now . . . stay tuned for York, Scotland, and a random 1-hour visit to Amsterdam!

Idea Man

Somewhere along the way, our little car-obsessed boy shifted gears. He used to spend the entire day planning out, mapping out, and then laying out new adventures for his cars. He still enjoys cars, talks about them, and definitely plays with them a little every day. But his new obsession is IDEAS! I can't think of a better way to explain it. He wakes up in the morning with an elaborate mission in mind: "Mom, today, let's have a transportation party! We'll invite all my friends, and first, we'll do transportation puzzles; then everyone can pretend to be whatever vehicle they want to be; then we'll watch Mighty Machines; then everyone can build cars or trucks out of Tinkertoys; and for dessert, we'll make a cake that looks like a digger!"

This is a great idea. There are only three problems with it: 1) He has no concept of how long it will actually take to carry out his idea, nor of the chance that we might already have plans for the day; 2) He is ready to go forward with it NOW, and I haven't even eaten breakfast yet; 3) Come 20 minutes, he'll be raring to go with another super duper schmooper big idea.

I would estimate that Henry comes up with at least 10 huge ideas per day. On an average day, he may be lucky enough to convince Mom to follow through with 1-2 of them (usually the ones that sound easiest win me over). Of those 1-2 ideas per day (let's call it 45 per month), only a few make it to publication on the blog. So now you know. We're swimming in ideas. Here are a few we happened to have the camera out for:

"Luggage Train" (we set up furniture like a train and then load everything on it)

"Paper Town." This one took days to convince me. When Henry saw this paper I bought with the houses on it, he just had to use it for something. He drew the roads and parking spaces and helped to glue everything together.

"Henry's Crown." He made this pretty much all by himself. I was so proud of his crown-drawing skills! He decided to make it for any siblings of his Joy School classmates who might feel bad that they didn't get a ticket for our pretend movie theater.

You may notice in the background some giant drawings, an ocean collage, etc. Most of Henry's recent ideas have been craft projects. "I just LOVE doing crafts!" he tells me nearly every day. I have decided to devote an entire wall to the projects, since our bulletin board was getting crowded :)

Below you will find today's idea: a movie entitled "Henry and the Purple Crayon."

Henry and the Purple Crayon from Ben and Jenn on Vimeo.

And if you are still reading, here are a few other ideas we have carried out, but haven't taken pictures of:

* a pirate/treasure party (with the babysitting co-op)

* "Train Builder" game

* "Sea Divers," a favorite game in which we all run around the house carrying bags that might scoop up random objects from the bottom of the ocean

And a few ideas he has insisted on several times, but we have yet to carry out because I don't quite grasp the vision:

* Make a Hawaiian Haystack just for a decoration

* Make our own website game where people can make their own family, choosing from different people with different colors of skin and different kinds of clothes.