Haggis Tour

Haggis Tour Day 1

I wish I could lie and say that the morning of the first day of the tour was a breeze, but it wasn’t. I was hungover (Sorry parents and family and anyone else who may be disappointed by my actions. One would think I would have learned my lesson the first time I was hungover, but much like grammar and spelling and English in general, I am a slow learner) and sleep deprived. So the morning was very, very rough. Thank goodness for my travel buddy being responsible and willing to put up with me being grumpy and needy. We got checked in and got on the bus. There weren’t two seats that were together , but we were able to sit across the aisle from each other. I was in no mood to be social, so I fell asleep pretty much as soon as the bus left. It was made clear that we had somewhat of an itinerary, but our driver would be taking us pretty much wherever she felt.

Our first stop was at a tiny so-called castle. A side view is below.

We stopped about every hour and half or so. Here are a few photos of some of the views, but I have no idea where they are from. Next time I will be using GPS so I know where I am!

We had lunch at a ski lodge, which was not very exciting, but it was enough that I was in a much better mood than earlier. The sleep I had gotten was also very helpful.

After lunch we went and saw Inverlochy Castle or really what was left of it.

We also went to a war memorial. It was a beautiful area, although it was in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. It was where the training grounds were though, so its location makes sense.

Soon after the memorial, we went to the hostel. After grabbing a microwave meal and scarffing it down, we went on a boat tour of Loch Ness. I was constantly vigilant in looking for Nessie, but I did not succeed in finding her. The boat captain said they believe that there are about 18 large creatures in the water because of the sonar readings they had taken. Below are a few pictures from the boat.

After the boat ride, we were walking back to the hostel and I FOUND NESSIE!!!! See! Here she is with her baby! Do I get monies or fame or something cool? I wanna be famous! 

The following day was similar to the first. We were told things that were said to be fact, but neither I nor my friend believed. The majority of our day was to be spent on the Isle of Skye or as I keep typing Isle of Skype. Our first stop was to get a really nice view of a castle, pictured below.

Then we continued on to make ourselves forever young and beautiful. There was this little river that we were supposed to put our faces in. I was not going to participate, but then our tour guide did it, so I hoped it was safe. Here is a picture of someone becoming young and beautiful. My dip in the water did not make me young or beautiful so I have determined that it either didn’t work or I already am young and beautiful. Shhhh! Do you hear that? That sound is my ego inflating.

Once we got on Isle of Skye, we stopped to have lunch. Then we continued on and were told a story of how to get your wishes to come true by carrying some water from a waterfall in your mouth and spitting it on a rock. Below is the picture of the waterfall. My friend went and did it, but I decided against it.

Following the adventure of a select few to grant wishes, we went to see the cliffs that supposedly looked like a giant’s kilt impression, but I don’t see it. Do you? It is supposed to be the far cliffs in the picture.

Here are a few more cliffs with beautiful ocean and sky. It just shows how gorgeous Scotland can be.

Finally, we started to head back to the Lock Ness area, but before going back to the hostel, we went to see the castle we had seen earlier. Here it is pictured.

I didn’t end up going into the castle because I wasn’t interested in seeing the interior. So I hung out with a few of the tour people while we waited for those who paid to go inside. After that we had a chill night in the hostel.

The third day, we went around to the other side of Loch Ness. We saw another set of castle remains, pictured below.

The following two pictures show the beach on Loch Ness. It was a drizzly day, but it was still beautiful and very peaceful.

Here is a hilarious sign I saw at the Loch Ness stop.

I just had to take and post a picture of the Scottish Flag since I was there and all. You know I just thought it was appropriate.

Our final stop on our Haggis Tour was to the Culloden battlefield. Below is a photo of the field and following is of one of the mass grave headstones.

Overall this tour was helpful in seeing the landscapes of Scotland. I had expected a bit more hiking and less time in the bus, but it just wasn’t so. We wouldn’t have been able to see much of it on our own unless we had rented a car, so I am very happy that we had the opportunity. I would like to come back to Scotland at some point, but maybe actually rent a car and do some hiking because I would love to see the landscapes in that way and not just along the street. 

A Load of Blarney

I have discussed a bit about the Ireland tour and my tour family before this, but here is the huge post about those crazy five days. Before I really begin, let me be clear. There may be some photos that have no captions or descriptions or anything. This is because I have no recollection of where they were taken, so just look at them and say “OOOOOO PRETTY” or something equally as nice.

Our tour started at 8:30 in the morning. I had made the promise to myself to try to actually get to know the people on this tour unlike the Scotland tour. I put on my “charm” and told my friend my plan. She agreed that we needed to branch out and make some friends, but I don’t think either of us was prepared for what happened on the tour. We had created real bonds with some of the group. Mind you the entire group was 29 tourists, a tour guide, and a bus driver and I will be honest, the tour family (aka Shamrocker fam), in my opinion, does not span the entire group. I would say about half of them are part of the fam. How did the family come about? I have no idea. It just sort of happened. People just clicked and I forced my way into their friendships ;) In all honesty, I probably forced a few people into hanging out with me, but for the most part, I think people actually liked me. Did I tell you that some of our family was a bit incestuous? Some of these relationships occurred rather quickly (in my opinion, which shouldn’t really mean much to others), while others took a few days to form. There were even a few that people thought might happen, but didn’t. Either way though, the family was a bit mixed up. The majority of the family are Australians, but I am glad to say that USA and Canada are well represented.

So back to the actual trip itself, our first stop was to a small town called SOMETHING. It was really just a chance for people to stretch their legs and grab some grub, but it was cute to see. There was a nice looking church which is pictured below.

After getting back on the bus, we traveled a bit further to see our first castle or the tour. The scaffolding really ruins the picture, but if you ignore it, the castle looks pretty cool. 

After that castle, we made our way to Blarney Castle to get the gift of gab and eloquence by kissing the Blarney stone. Apparently it did not work for me. Apologies to you all!

Here is the castle from the outside and the inside and then finally a picture of me kissing the stone!

As you can see, you have to lean back and hold onto railings to get to the actual stone. There is even someone there to hold you to prevent you from hurting yourself/falling/kissing the wrong stone. I didn’t want to kiss the stone where most other people had kissed it, so I leant back as far as I possibly could to get fewer germs. I really wanted to be able to have the gift of eloquence so I gave that stone the biggest kiss ever!

After kissing the stone, we wandered the castle grounds. Here is a picture from the top of the castle

Here is the mansion on the grounds. It was very pretty and worth the walk over.

Unfortunately, my camera battery died and I was unable to take anymore photos. The rest of the day was spent exploring Kilarney, the town where our hostel was. We also met Pa, a story teller in one of the pubs, who ended up being very vulgar and creepy. Then we went out as a group to a club and danced a good part of the night away. There we saw Pa again and he was even more creepy than earlier. A fifty something year old who says he has kids and a wife, should not grab at 19 year olds. That ends the first day of our adventure with Shamrocker. 

Gold, Gold, Gold

If you read the last post, it makes perfect sense why my first picture for this one is this beautiful, extraordinary sandwich. It was absolutely glorious. It was a vegetarian breakfast sandwich with lots of cheese, hash browns, tomato, and other deliciousness.  If you didn’t read the post just before this one go do that. I will wait.

Did you read it? No? Well I will just remind you that we had tried to sleep in the Glasgow airport the night before. Oh and did I mention it wasn’t the Glasgow International Airport? It was the Ryan Air/ other budget airplane airport which makes it all the more uncomfortable.

Well anyway back to the sandwich that is pictured. It was needed because if you haven’t slept, the last thing you need is to be hungry too. Man was this sandwich delicious. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. This is how our day in Dublin started: me and my two friends eating pure gold.

We then made our way to Guinness. It may not have been after noon, but it was somewhere else in the world. Now for those of you who are not aware, Guinness is my beer of choice if I am going to drink beer. It is full of flavour and creamy and good to the last drop. The building was so cool. I just can’t describe it well enough and my pictures weren’t even good enough to show how cool it was. But here are a few to try to explain it.

This beautiful picture is of the recipe for Guinness.

Here is a cool indoor waterfall they have to help demonstrate how important water is to the beer (plus they probably wanted something cool looking).

In one of the rooms, they taught you how to taste Guinness by providing you a quarter of a pint and instructing you to smell and breathe and such. Luckily, by this point it was noon and a more acceptable drinking time. (except there are a great deal of Irishmen who I saw drinking at 9am)

My favourite interactive part of the Guinness tour was actually being taught how to pour Guinness. This was so much fun. I feel like I could be a bartender now, except I don’t know anything about alcohol except for that. The walls behind the bars were really cool and are shown below.

After you do a correct pour, they present you with a certificate and you can drink your Stout. Here is my glass and my certificate.

Oh and did I mention that there is a glass sculpture thingy that is shaped like a glass of Guinness that hangs from the ceiling/ is part of the multiple floors. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was awesome.

Ok well, let’s move on to a different part of my day that doesn’t involve alcohol. After the tour, we wandered around the city. Here is a picture of Four Courts or Court or something like that.

Here is a church we saw that is right next to the hostel I stayed in. The church was pretty cool looking, but the church bells that went off every 15minutes were not. Try sleeping with bells ringing all night! There is no such thing as beauty sleep with them! You wake up uglier than when you went to sleep!

This is part of Dublin castle, although it isn’t original to the old castle. It still looked nice and was the only nice looking part of “Dublin castle” because part of the newer areas were painted horrid colours like pink. It was absolutely disgusting!

This is the stables of the castle or at least that is what I remember it to be. I could do a bit of research, but seeing as I am lazy and I am writing this without internet, I am going to declare it as such. Anyway they made this beautiful pattern thingy in the grass and I absolutely loved the contrast of the old stone and the newer building behind it. And look at the sky! It was so blue and nice! The weather was great, but this was practically the only true day of sun we had in Ireland.

Did I mention that by about 2 or so I was really grumpy? I mean I was sleep deprived, so what else would you expect? My wonderful traveling companions were not having it and were making light at my mood and I was absolutely positively not having any of it. I just got grumpier and grumpier. Luckily we went and got food and my demeanor improved significantly. After food, we went to St Stephen's Green. Pictured below are a couple pictures of it. It was such a nice day that we decided to sit on the grass for a bit and relax. This didn’t last too long though because we quickly became aware of the fact that we were surrounded by couples making out. It wouldn’t have been so bad except some of them really needed to get a room and one couple, whom I thought were father and daughter, joined the masses.

After being thoroughly grossed out, we went to Trinity College. The buildings were very beautiful. This one below is in the center of a large group of buildings.

Finally we went to see the bridge that looks like a harp. It is actually a very cool looking bridge, but to me, I don’t think it looks very sturdy. I am sure it is completely safe, but it just looks so fragile!

Oh and here is my new pirate ship! I am looking for a crew, so if ye be interested, comment below with a big “YARRRRRRR!” We are only accepting those who have previous pirate experience at this time, but feel free to submit yer resume anyway!

I just love statues that aren't on pedestals and are part of the surroundings. This one interested me because, well, just look at it, isn't it nifty? Does anyone use nifty anymore? No? Well I just did, so there! Anyways, Dublin was awesome! I had good people around me and good weather and it was just a nice place to explore. Dublin is a place to go back to for sure!

A Mini Adventure

Back in late May, I did a quick day trip to Ilkley with two girls from my building. We had decided that we had stupidly never really explored the area around Leeds during the year. Originally we had made a list of places to visit and we declared that we would go to a few of them before we all left. With no surprise, we didn’t make all of them. In fact, we only got to one: Ilkley. Don’t get me wrong Ilkley is a beautiful area, but I do wish I had explored the region more than I had. Oh well! Regrets don’t amount to much in life, so dwell on them, I shall not! (ok some I will dwell on for quite a while, but this one I will remedy some day in the future hopefully!)

So as I said, Ilkley is beautiful. We had decided to bus over in the morning, but the girls woke up late and it turned out to be more of a journey made at noon. I had a bit of a hissy fit because I like to keep to schedules when possible and leaving two hours later was appalling. But in the end, it turned out completely fine. The bus journey was around an hour long, which was uncomfortable because I was nauseas for most of it and standing for about half.

Here are a few pictures of the town center. It was fairly tiny, but still larger than we had anticipated. We had a nice pub lunch before out real exploration began.

We found this cool house, which doesn’t look that great in the picture, but I swear it was cool.

The whole point of the journey was to take a nice hike. We had chosen one that would take about two to three hours and had a “steady incline”. Turns out the steady incline was a steep incline lasting for about half an hour or so. I was enjoying it, but being out of shape, I did get a bit out of breath. Here are a couple pictures during the incline.

At some point we had made a wrong turn on our hike, which wasn’t hard to do when there was no signage pointing the way and multiple paths going in just as many directions. Our hike lasted only about an hour, but the view we had after the incline was wonderful and totally worth all the hassle that had come earlier in the day. Here is a view from the top.

Here is a cool little bridge we saw on our way down. 

All in all the trip was well worth it. I had a lot of fun with the girls and it was nice to have something to do with my day. We made our way home in the late afternoon and the bus journey back was entertaining, although a bit maddening. The girls went a bit mental and kept quoting movies and youtube videos and a bunch of other stuff. They got so loud at one point that I thought we were going to be kicked off. Luckily, no one complained and we made it back to Leeds.

More Like Don't Go

The Scotland tour blog post is still in progress, so you will have to just put up with the other cities until I finish it.

Glasgow was the next stop after Edinburgh. We were there only for the day on the 28th of June.

Glasgow was terrible weather while we were there. It was just raining in sheets. I didn’t take many photos because it was so doomy and gloomy. There was a church that I though looked cool, but the photo doesn’t do it any justice.

My friend and I went to a cute place called No. 1 Chocolate Factory to kill some time. We both got hot chocolates and they were practically a melted chocolate bar with a dash of milk. I was in heaven. Shown is my empty cup.

After trekking around the city, my friend and I headed back to our hostel to get in contact with one of the people we had met in Edinburgh. We invited him to come and hang out with us in the bar attached to our hostel and we discovered that all three of us were on the same flight to Dublin early the next morning. We decided that because our flight was so early, it would be beneficial for all of us to just grab the last train in the evening to the airport and just sleep there. Here is a photo of their wonderful beds.

I am sure it is easy to see that sleep was not a viable option, but they got a few hours of sleep and I got a couple. We had a lot of fun spending our time together though.

Glasgow was not an awful city, but after Edinburgh and seeing all the beauty the rest of Scotland had to offer, it was a bit of a let down. I am happy I saw it, but I don’t think I will be going back anytime soon.

My Thoughts and You Know I Have Them and Need To Share

As I am sure you have noticed by now, I like to just post my random thoughts and feelings as they come to me. Often times it is just a jumble of words and sentences that I like to pretend make sense and you all seem to either go along with it or skip reading. This is going to be another one of those random jumbles. YAY! Or BOOO! Whatever you want.

My wonderful traveling companion left today. I was going to hold her hostage, but she has work on Monday and I don’t have the funds to take care of her and myself. It makes me a bit sad to again be alone. (OMG cutest baby ever is here in Costa with me! Awwwwwwwwww! It is soooo tiny! OK FOCUS) I am not really alone yet though. I am lucky enough to have a friend here in the UK willing to house me until I leave for Spain in a few days. That is when I will actually be alone. As it stands, I am sad. Last week I said good bye to my tour family and then this week I said good bye to part of the tour family that we met up with again and this morning I said good bye to my travel buddy! It is just an endless cycle of good byes! Granted in about 7 weeks, I move in with my travel buddy. But that doesn’t make up for the fact that she left! Hurumph! I am excited of the prospects of going to New Zealand next year and meeting up with the tour family once again! HUZZAH!!!! HUZZAH!!!! But that is in A YEAR OR SO!!!!! Gosh that seems so far away! How am I to survive? Anyway we have sort of already covered this topic, so I will now leave it alone (well at least for this post).

On continues my pity party. I am sick. Not like a deathly ill or lifelong disease or anything remotely serious, but in a feel like my head will explode shortly before or after my lungs are coughed up sort of way. Now in all honesty, I am doing fine with the miracle of drugs (legal ones of course!). I just don’t really have a voice and my nose is a faucet full of ick. It also sort of sounds like I have the plague. This may or may not be the case, I haven’t really been paying attention (Oh hey! What is that black thing on my arm? Oh it is just a mole nevermind). This is also probably the worst I have ever looked except for the photos of me sleeping with my mouth open. My eyes look like they have sunk as far into my face as humanly possible and I constantly look like Rudolph with my bright red nose. Add to that my current hunched back and my lack of energy to lift my feet. In short terms: I could easily pull of being a zombie with no work done on me whatsoever. When I called my mother a few nights ago, I am pretty sure she thought I was sick enough sounding to be hospitalized. But I am not and refuse to get to be that bad! I have a month and seven days to travel and spend whatever is left in my accounts and I don’t want to spend anymore on being sick!

Fun fact: I cannot remember my pin numbers for my old cards and my UK accounts are down to the last few pennies. Hahahaha whoops! Kids let this be a lesson for you: stick to your budget. If you don’t, you are pretty much screwed! Btw, does anyone know how many attempts can be made guessing a pin number until they shut down your c