Some of my favourite things

A few of my favourite things

Once we get past Edinburgh, Dave hits auto-pilot, after his many previous trips to Perth for work, and he regaled me with tales of those trips as we headed north from the bridge. We'd planned to break for lunch at the McDonalds in the outskirts of Perth and arrived at around 1pm to find, surprisingly, lots of school children in uniform; evidently not only not half-term up here, but not  Bank Holiday either. We've been here on most of our trips to Scotland, so it feels like the start of the holiday proper.

The rest of the drive was uneventful; we came off the A9 at Kingussie for our traditional stop and look at Ruthven Barracks. This involved me scrambling up and down the verge to try an get a decent photo. I'm always after good advice from Dave on how to compose landscape photos - I know some of the so-called rules, but never have a clear idea, when seeing somewhere beautiful, how to capture it best.

Ruthven Barracks

Having stopped briefly at the amazing ruins, we enjoyed the picturesque back roads past Insh and Inshriach and into Aviemore, and our destination.

We unpacked the car quickly, and then stocked up on provisions at Tesco and once we got back to the cottage, bumped into Paul and June (the owner of our holiday cottage and pretty much family - June is my brother's sister-in-law) and young Sandy. After a quick catch-up, we unloaded the shopping and headed out to reacquaint ourselves with the local area.

We drove up to the carpark of the Cairngorm visitor centre to take a lovely walk out along one of the mountain tracks in the lovely evening sunshine. Before we reached the carpark, we stopped to admire the view across the valley to the peaks further south, and heard a nearby ptarmigan. Didn't manage to see it unfortunately. 

Cairngorm visitor centre

One of a series of wonderful winter sports sculptures

 

Great views of the still snow-capped mountains from the path

After a lovely hour-long walk, with some more photography lessons on the way, we returned to the cottage for beans on toast, and broke open our DVD box set of Season 5 of Game of Thrones.

 Tuesday May 31st

When asked to plan one of my perfect days, there are two things that are almost essential - having breakfast at the wonderful Mountain Cafe in Aviemore, and visiting the Highland Wildlife Park. This, therefore, was always going to be a wonderful day. We left the house at 7.55 and walked into the village to await the opening of the ever-popular Mountain cafe. In previous years, we've had to queue up the back stairs until 8.30 (getting there early is often essential to ensure you get a table), as the cafe is situated above a mountain goods shop, but it appears the shop has started opening at 8.30 daily to allow the customers of the cafe to queue up the main stairs. As it happened, we were first there and got a table at the picture window. The food was as good as ever; Dave had French toast with fruit and bacon and the berriest smoothie I've ever seen. I treated myself to pancakes and bacon and fruit and a lovely coffee. It was truly gorgeous, and during breakfast we decided to spend the rest of the day at the wildlife park.

Dave's very berry smoothie in Mountain Cafe, Aviemore

Dave enjoying his Mountains Cafe breakfast.

We strolled back to the cottage and picked up the cameras and drove to Kincraig where the wildlife park opened at 10.30am. The day turned warm and sunny and, based on feeding times and talks, we decided to start by parking up and doing the walk round part of the park first. We enjoyed seeing all the usual animals and heard the talks on red pandas, Japanese macaques (snow monkeys) with several really young babies, lynx with cubs (extremely well hidden in the overgrown habitat of their cage), gorgeous Scottish wildcats, one male polar bear (Walker) and the rather shy snow leopards. 

Female red panda

Japanese macaque mum and baby

Japanese macaque acrobatically taking a drink

Japanese macaque

Beautiful Scottish wildcat

Walker, one of the male polar bears, having his lunch

After a patient wait, one of the snow leopards showed itself.
There was a suggestion the female was close to giving birth, hence their reluctance to appear, even for lunch.

We fitted in lunch between talks and feeding, but despite waiting for half an hour, didn't get to see the Amur Tigers being fed, which is usually a fabulous ferocious sight.

Enjoying the sun, this tiger wouldn't leave the outdoor enclosure,
making setting out the food tricky. 

We had a quick ice-cream in the sun, and then, belatedly headed off for the road-trip round the Main Reserve, seeing the bison, camels, elk and lots of lapwing and oystercatchers with their respective chicks.

Gorgeous oystercatcher

Bison

Lapwing and a flock of goslings

Redshank

Eurasian Elk

Eurasian Elk mum with her calves

Przewalski's Horses in the beautiful backdrop

Red deer in the park

Wolverine

Bactrian camel

We got back in time to hear the talk on the busy wolverines and just missed the chance to go round the reserve again by about 3 minutes. The only disappointment was the fact that the wolf wood was temporarily closed, and Dave wasn't able to see this favourite creature of his.

We had a quiet evening, bath, chicken salad and the next episode of Game of Thrones.

Wednesday June 1st

Appropriately for the new month, we'd arranged to meet up with June, to have coffee and cake at the wonderful Potting Shed tearoom at the garden centre in Inshriach. It opened at 10, so after breakfast we went for a quick walk round the Rothiemurchus Lodge end of Loch Morlich. The day started off grey, but had begun to brighten up when we got to the garden centre at 10 and met up with June.

Sunny Scotland

Newcastle and beyond

Late May Bank Holiday weekend

So, we're heading to beautiful Scotland again and trying vaguely to recreate our New Zealand trip with its gorgeous scenery, dominated by forests, lakes and mountains, relaxation, walking and wildlife-watching. 

After packing the car and filling it with petrol, we left home at 10:30 on Saturday morning and joined the Great British public in their traditional Bank Holiday pursuit of sitting in traffic jams. Along with the extra traffic, there were some further delays due to roadworks, so we took rather longer than expected to reach Newcastle. Even the usual oasis of calm that is Wetherby services was no fun - inhabited as it was by scores of hen and stag-party goers, and some rather persistent mobile phone company reps. We opted for lunch from the West Cornwall Pasty company, eaten in the car, and then drove on, stopping briefly for a photo-op in Dave's family's former home in Swalwell.

A welcome from the Angel

That small diversion meant we missed the worst of the Gateshead roadworks and we dropped off our gear at the Airport Premier Inn before driving to my brother and sister-in-law, John and Lois's. After a quick catch-up, admiring their new kitchen and having a drink out in the garden (and handing over a few souvenirs from our Kiwi adventure as well as my nephew Rory's belated birthday presents) we opted to head out for tea. We went to the Twin Farms, and luckily were early enough to be able to eat at a table which had been reserved, but not until after 7pm - Bank Holiday weekend! Its a lovely walk there and back, and we spent the rest of the evening chatting, me with John and Lois, and Dave with Rory who was in full-on composer mode.
We went back to the Premier Inn for a bath and to sleep, though Dave was woken by the early morning plane departures. We McBreakfasted and arrived back at John and Lois's at around 9am. The lack of an iron in our hotel room had partly informed my clothing choice for the day, along with John's suggestion that a visit to the coast would be likely. Rory wanted us to go to Blyth to experience his favourite ice-cream vendors, and there were a couple of fun-sounding music-related events at Newbiggin-by-the-sea and nearby village pubs which might make a good day of things. We headed first to the northernmost of these, Newbiggin, and had a bracing walk along the beach in the typical Northumberland bank holiday weather!

Flo and Bob, the Newbiggin-by-the-sea statues. Oh, and Dave.

Not very promising for a Bank Holiday village fayre is it?

Lovely mural in Newbiggin-by-the-sea

We stopped for a coffee, while Dave and Rory explored the rock pools and Rory videoed himself for one of his YouTube videos. 

Newbiggin coffee shop

We then headed for the village fayre with its dodgy stalls, seaside-style throw-a-thing, win-a-thing games (much to Rory's anti-Minion disgust), and (what we'd gone for) the Eukele band performance. We listened for a while, aloof and unimpressed naturally (although I must confess that I danced when they did Delilah), and then drove south to Blyth.

Eukele Band

Win a minion anyone?

We'd been before, a few years earlier, and recognised the building, but it had been done up considerably inside, so we had lunch in Coastline, the fish and chip cafe, followed by various of the delightful selection of ice-creams, including Ferrero Rocher, Blue vanilla, Tutti Frutti and honeycomb. 

Yummy ice-cream

Blyth beach huts

Despite another walk along the beach outside the restaurant, we were too early for the live music afternoon, so went back to the house (it not being especially warm and thereby not encouraging lingering).

After a quick vote, we change plans and headed for a walk round the Havana woodland area with lakes and woods and some wildlife. There some lovely wild flowers which didn't mind being regularly over-flown by the Newcastle airplanes, but not many birds.

We drove back and sat around snoozing and chatting while Dave 'helped' Rory work on his song by sharing some of his favourite YouTube videos and sounds. His creativity and endeavour are so impressive, and he's able to compose amazing melodies and create all sorts of styles of music; it must be wonderful to be so talented. 


Agreeing that we'd all had too much lunch for a big tea, we had a lovely buffet-style salad supper before watching the new Top Gear, an old Death in Paradise and then saying goodnight.

On Monday morning, we decided we'd start for Scotland at about 10, but then overslept slightly (less plane noise), and didn't get to John's until nine. We joined them for breakfast and enjoyed their reaction to a couple of Heck and Scaramanga Six videos. We chatted a bit about John's forthcoming 50th birthday party plans, and then got on the road. The traffic was much better, and we made really good time, reaching the border in low cloud, drizzle and barely double figure temperatures at  about 11:15. 

As we headed towards Edinburgh and the Forth road bridge, it warmed up and the sun appeared, shining nicely on the new bridge being built alongside the existing one. Not sure how long until its finished, but it looks fabulous.

You may notice, not a single keyring was purchased during the making of this blog post. Shocking.

Practicing his moody teenager gaze, ready for rock stardom

    

Extras and keyrings

Addendum/Appendix/Extras

Not many people were previously allowed to know that I collect keyrings, but I think it may have slipped out once or twice during the previous few chapters of the New Zealand blog. Now the fact that I am a copoclephile is out in the open, I figured I might as well start showing them off.

Just for completeness, for those aspects of our holiday that didn't produce keyrings, I have added one or two pictures of tickets/brochures and so on which were kept as alternative souvenirs.

The Auckland Skytower keyring on the cover of the rather tacky photo-souvenir they sell you.

A lovely wooden Maori carving as a memento of our trip to the Auckland War Memorial museum and cultural show

This is unusual for me, I rarely buy keyrings that don't include the name of the place I want them to act as a reminder of. 

Sealife keyring

I made an effort to buy different styles of keyrings - there's nothing worse than a series of the same keyrings just with different place names on them!

Tickets and daily programme for the Auckland Museum

Ticket for Auckland Harbour cruise

Russell keyring and Dolphin Encounter brochure

Keyring from Paihia in Bay of Islands

Keyring and ticket from Te Puia at Rotorua

Keyring with a photo of the beautiful Champagne Pool at Wai-O-Tapu, Rotorua

A very badly taken photo of my glow-in-the-dark Waitomo Glowworm cave keyring

Hobbiton collection

OK, so sometimes there are really special places that deserve more than one memento, and Hobbiton was certainly such a place. The lovely fridge magnet hairy feet actually came from the Weta workshop. Appropriate that the Green Dragon keyring is a bottle opener, I think.

No keyrings for our Lake Taupo boat trip

Lovely Art Deco Napier

Zealandia

No keyrings with birds on that had the name Zealandia on, so I bought this one. I also had to buy one of this lovely swamphen as it was one of my favourite New Zealand birds.

Lovely cute swamphen

Wellington Cable car tickets

Tickets for the Thunderbirds tour at Weta workshop

Weta workshop postcards and keyrings

Te papa

The Te Papa museum building is beautiful and a fitting design for the keyring I chose to represent the 2 visits we made. They also had keyings for some of the specific exhibitions, but this was my favourite.

OK, even the InterIslander ferry has it's own keyring! 

Placed it on a map of the general area of the crossing route from Wellington to Picton.

Kahu kayaks in Abel Tasman National Park have no keyrings; I did get a T-shirt though!

Whale watching specific keyring bought in Kaikoura

The obligatory kiwi keyring from the Franz Josef wildlife centre with the fewest animals ever

The Milford Sound trip started and ended at a building surprisingly devoid of shopping opportunities. I've included the Go Orange tickets and 'fush & chups' voucher alongside a somewhat Kiwi-themed lanyard I also bought myself!

The Royal Albatross centre

Lovely blue penguin

Blue penguin, blue penguin, so cute I put it in twice

Obviously no opportunity on Mount Cook for a keyring, but I picked up a lovely brochure!

We didn't pick up any brochures in Hanmer Springs (home of this fantastic chiropractor - I especially love the ferny spine), so I had to photograph my lovely autumnal picture keyring on the Lonely Planet guidebook page for the town. You may notice the crazy golf score-cards, but as this as the one I lost, I've carefully hidden the score part!

Akaroa on the beautiful Banks peninsula

There a lovely dolphin swimming-specific keyring, but I also briought home a Hector's dolphin and my "I helped save the Hector's dolphin" wristband.

Of course airports have their own keyrings, why wouldn't they!

It's fair to say that my baggage was heavier on the way home than on the way there, and I have a nice bowlful of keyrings sitting in the dining room, waiting for a more permanent and creative home. More than likely, they'll end up hung on my cork board (like recent other additions to the collection), but at least they've had a limited public airing and their own 15 minutes of fame.  

PS I'm beginning to think perhaps I should be more, er, collectorly about this, and may even resort to counting them all one day soon lol