Reconnecting with Friends and Nature in the UK
We kicked off our two weeks in the UK in London! This was our first time back to London since October 2019, and we were especially excited about this leg of our trip because we were going to have the chance to catch up with friends! It was also a little bittersweet since we had planned to move to London at the end of 2022 and that had always been a dream of ours, but we can’t complain since it served as a catalyst for the adventure we are on now.
We stayed at our friends’, Deniz and Chris’s, house in Balham, which is one of the neighborhoods we had been scoping out to potentially live in, and we enjoyed pretending like we were residents, even if for a short time! We also got to watch their dog, Mr. Finn, an energetic labradoodle who snuggled any chance he could. We were in heaven!
The main reason we headed to London was to meet up with our friends, Alex and Hayley, who were on a family trip. This came at the perfect time because after about five months on the road, we were starting to miss home quite a bit, especially friends and family. We spent the five days tagging along on their family activities and being full on tourists. We finally saw a changing of the guards ceremony, rode on a double decker hop on hop off tour, and enjoyed a Sunday roast!
In addition to seeing Alex and Hayley, we also had a chance to catch up with other friends who live in London. We had dinner one night with Deniz and Chris, went out to drinks with our friends Jatin and Babli from India, and a long time Carideo family friend, Rachael, and her husband Chris had us over for a really lovely dinner. While we actually never moved to London, there’s something about the city that feels very comfortable and like a little slice of home.
After five days in London, we hopped on a train to Edinburgh where we picked up our rental car (tiny little Fiat 500) for our 10-day road trip around Scotland. We mapped out a counterclockwise route that started in St. Andrews, went up to Aberdeen, through Cairngorms National Park, over to Inverness, up to the Isle of Skye, and back down through Oban and Glasgow before ending back in Edinburgh and Leith.
Just as we experienced in New Zealand, we found that much of Scotland’s beauty was in the journey, not necessarily the destination. We took our time driving through the countryside, stopping in small towns to walk the high streets, pulling off the road at lookout points (and sometimes just on the side of the road) to admire the landscape, and enjoying all the sheep, cows, castles, and fields of flowers that we passed along the way. We never found ourselves in a rush to get to our next destination and just let ourselves get lost in the rolling green hills.
Oh… we must not forget the whiskey tastings along the way. We tasted our way through Scotland, learning all about the different regions and flavor profiles of the whiskies, visiting Talisker and Oban distilleries, and stopping for many drams at local pubs along the way. We tried very hard to get Britt to like whiskey, and while we made a little headway, there’s definitely still a ways to go.
We really lucked out with perfect weather. We had blue skies for 10 straight days, which based on our conversations with locals, is rather unheard of. We also had A LOT of sunlight. There was light for almost 20 hours each day. It was so nice and refreshing! We also lucked out with our accommodations, staying at some of the most unique places so far on our trip. In the Isle of Skye, we stayed at someone’s farm with incredible views of the lake and two horses that visited us in the morning! In Oban, we stayed in an old guest house above a pub. We ate at the pub for dinner and then listened to the 2010s jams until 2am. It was a lot of fun and a night we won’t forget.
Another thing we loved about Scotland was that everything was super old! The amount of history is incredible, and it’s impressive how many buildings are still standing (and in operation) from hundreds of years ago. We found ourselves saying, “If only the walls could talk”, many times on this trip. It was pretty surreal walking into the old pubs and wondering how many people had sat in the same chairs we were sitting in and all the crazy stories that would have taken place throughout their hundreds of years of being in operation.
In addition to some of the most scenic drives we’ve ever been on, another fun outcome of our road trip was that Justin learned to drive a manual car. We spent some time practicing in Phoenix before we left on our trip because we knew we would be assigned a manual car for one of our road trips at some point. Scotland was a good place to learn since there were few cars on the road and the only living creatures in danger would be sheep and cows. (Side Note: No sheep, cows, cars, or humans were harmed during the learning of this new skill.) Even though Britt was a fabulous teacher, there were definitely a few hiccups (a few mid-intersection stall outs and several attempts to get up a very steep hill), but overall smooth sailing! We’re glad we had a chance to get some of the kinks out here before we pick up our camper van in Switzerland later this summer… that will be a true test of not only our skill, but of our nervous systems and teamwork.
Scotland was absolutely stunning and is definitely somewhere we want to visit again… there is so much more to discover! We have heard that the Northern Isles are potentially even more stunning than the areas we explored, so that will be on our list for a future trip.
