Big City Lights

Wow, back from the big city of LONDON!!! What a fast, hectic, awesome, whirlwind couple of days. We have navigated the underground, fought through other tourists, sat in the top of a double decked bus and fed a squirrel in Hyde Park. :-)

We arrived in London on Wednesday (11th Sept) after a 5 hour train and tube trip. We had a quick walk around wimbledon, no wombles unfortunately!
12th Sept: into London Town we go! We headed straight to the Natural History Museum. It is absolutely mind-blowing, wow!!! There are more spectacular rocks and minerals than a geologist can look at! 'The Vault' was a collection of interesting and precious stones, including a PRIVATE (!!!) collection of 296 coloured diamonds. Unfortunately the dinosaurs were on holiday, but that didn't mean we didn't have enough to keep us busy. We saluted Darwin's statue and enjoyed some very cool fossils! We spent about 3 hours there and only did half of the museum. Definitely somewhere to go and see again next time! After that we had a quick (2hours) look around the Science museum - history of computing, maths and flying. Exhausted after all this excitement, we dragged ourselves up to Hyde Park for our picnic lunch. The rain stayed away :-) and we got to see part of the World  Championship Triathlon as they swam around the Serpentine Lake. And of course I found my squirrels who shared my lunch with me. Once recovered and revived we walked to Harrods. WOW!!! Scary and waaaay too many people, but very interesting to see. Loads of money being spent and incredible to see all the different nationalities in one place.

13th Sept: Happy Birthday Miss Bray! Kirst met us in the morning and we made our way into London to find a hop-on-hop-off red bus tour. Apart from being veeery wet, it was a great interesting way to see all the sights for the first time and to get some of the history behind this amazing city. Unfortunately, due to the rain, my camera didn't click nearly as much as I wanted it to, but got a couple of good shops. We ended the tour with a cruise along the Thames River. After being nicely drenched we headed to a yummy Thai Restaurant for supper to meet some of Kirst's friends and to warm up!

14th Sept: early morning rugby with a room full of South Africans who quickly became very unhappy South Africans! After the disappointing game, we headed back to the city towards the Tower of London. We went the traditional route and had fish and chips for lunch, in front of the Tower, overlooking the Thames and fighting off pigeons! Once inside, we explored the White Tower and saw the very sparkly and impressive Crown Jewels. We also had a look at the torture chambers and saw the spot where numerous people, including Anne Boleyn was beheaded! A very grim part of London's history and scary to think how much absolute power some of the Kings had. Tim loved the exhibitions in the White Tower, with all the armour and weapons. There was also very cool dragon made out of guns, maps and armour. The history in this one small(ish) part of London is incredible.
After Tower of London we made our way back to Putney to celebrate Kirst getting old at the boathouse on the Thames River. It was a great night with lots of South Africans to chat to. A fantastic way to toast London, :-)

15th Sept: time to head back to Scotland, with a long list of things to do on our next trip to the big city!

Lots of love to everyone!xxx H♥

Acclimatizing

So we can slowly see that winter is peeking at us from around a corner. The days are getting shorter and the temperature is slowly dropping. Even though Tim and I are no where near ready for winter, we are enjoying acclimatizing to the Scottish! We supported the local Collin vs Torthorwald cricket game, and can see why SA usually beats Scotland! But it was a lovely warm sunny day, soaked up by the South Africans while Scots looked for shade.
We had a great day out with Brain, Megs and Kendra when we went to see the Grey Mare's Tail Waterfall, the 5th highest waterfall in Scotland. We walked up to a fantastic viewpoint and really enjoyed the scenery. The Roaming Linn which forms the 60m drop winds it's way through the purple heather filled hills, just for my mommy!!!
After visiting the waterfall we made our way to St Mary's Loch where we had a picnic lunch in the sun, on the bank of the Loch. Such a picturesque, beautiful place and exactly what you imagine when you think of Scotland. ♡♡♡
We also stopped at a dairy that Brian collects milk from. The have 2 robotic milking machines which are incredible so see in action, especially for a farmer's daughter. The cows stay in a shed all day and are trained to walk through the robot 4 times a day to be milked automatically. Very very cool - suddenly only 2 people are needed to run a farm that milks 220 cows. Luckily I had Megan there to interpret for me because I only understood every 4th word from the farmer in his thick accent.

We have also been able to see how the country locals do it by going to the Moniaive Gala where we watched traditional dancing with bagpipes and swords, sheepdogs working and even alpacas! Kendra and I went to 2 other country shows in England last week to help with the shetland pony showing. I was expecting to just sit back, enjoy it and watch but was thrown into the deep end and actually had to show a couple of miniatures! The ponies are very cute and full of attitude. It was great fun, and my pony and I even won a 3rd place :-) My favourite was a tiny 11 week old foal, much smaller than our ridgeback, Max! He was so good and won foal of the show. I really enjoyed walking round the show, there was everything from vintage tractors to ducks, sheep and vegetables. The second show even had some carriage driving events which were awesome to watch. So I have officially decided to sell my car when we get back and replace it with horse and carriage.

Apart from the rural life, we had a quick introduction to the city on Saturday when we took Kendra to Edinburgh and then helped Megan move flats in Glasgow. Both cities are beautiful and we definitely need to go back to do some proper site-seeing!

Other exciting news: heading to London on Wednesday for 4 nights, yay! Going to be a culture shock for us small-time third world Africans but looking forward to it. Super excited to be seeing Kirst for her birthday and keen to explore the city a little bit! So loads of news coming after our visit.

Huge hugs to everyone and lots of love! Enjoy the pictures. XH♥