Hello, and welcome back to your annual story time of Ben and Sarah’s international adventures! Keeping with the tradition of the last few years, Sarah and I visited with her family, this year going back to Scotland.

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Tuesday, 24-Dec-2019 and Wednesday, 25-Dec-2019

 

Our visit started with a trip to Sainsbury’s.

I mean, not really.  It started with a lovely evening visiting with Greta and Bill, and then an amazing breakfast with the whole family the next morning.  After all of that, though, we headed out and got Sarah the fix that she’d been craving for three years – Sainsbury’s butter chicken takeaway.  Seriously, I think Sarah may possibly like that takeaway better than me… not that I blame her, of course.  It’s freaking amazing.

 

Aside from the grocery run, our first few days in Scotland were gloriously relaxed – very much appreciated after the hectic end to 2019 that we’d been having with work and projects. We visited, caught up with everyone, and enjoyed being able to sit back and relax.

For Christmas Eve, we went back to St. Maccar’s cathedral in Aberdeen – it looked exactly like we remembered it from last time, and even though we’d seen it before it was no less awe inspiring to see such a massive building carved from equally huge granite stones.

The service was lovely, but one fun item of note actually happened afterward, when we were walking back to the car.  The path to the cathedral itself isn’t lit, and as we left the building we saw two lovely little old ladies tottering their way down the unlit path, trying their best to carefully walk over the uneven cobblestones.  I don’t know who got to them first – Greta or myself, offering our arms, or Sarah and Henry shining their flashlights to illuminate the path.

Whomever got their first, the results were excellent – we made it to our car, and the ladies made it to theirs.  All unharmed, and with us all feeling good that we’d helped them out, and them feeling happy that we’d so enthusiastically zipped by to help.

 

Christmas day was equally relaxing, with the traditional Lydecker breakfast of waffles and bacon being served up with the always-excellent nespresso lattes.  Following Christmas morning unwrapping of presents, we rested a bit more before heading out on a quick jaunt to the beach to sight-see and bird-watch.

We even happened to arrive at exactly the perfect time to see a whole pod of harbor porpoises hunting!  Thankfully, Bill had brought binoculars along, so we were able to see the porpoises circling and jumping as they chased after whatever school of fish they were hunting… it was amazing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it before.

The rest of the day?  There really wasn’t much, actually – one of the downsides of being so far North is the impressively short days.  Not a problem though, since we had just enough board games, and an excellent dinner, to keep us entertained.