A wee trip to Scotland

Poor Stephen wasn't very well last week. He came down with a cold just a few days before we were due to drive to Scotland, which caused us a little debate about when we should drive up. Fully expecting to abandon the original plan to travel on Thursday afternoon we did no packing, until Stephen announced around noon that we may as well get it over with as there was no guarantee that he'd feel any better on the Friday. We had looked out what clothes we were taking and this was quickly and neatly packed, but we ended up throwing shoes, phone chargers, hair straighteners etc (ie all the odds and sods) into carrier bags. I was like a bag lady taking all my possessions out to the car! Must remember for next time that we do have holdalls for that sort of thing - it would certainly have made dragging the stuff in and out the car at each location much easier!!

The first stop of the Sparks go to Scotland tour was to East Kilbride to see Stephen's family. It was something of a whistlestop tour - compressed by Stephen's need for a 2 hour nap on Friday after taking far too much out of himself going to the driving range. This rather squashed the time available to get round everyone, but we made it!

The second stop was Loch Lomond, via the Romanian Orthodox Church in Glasgow, for Monica and Adrian's wedding. What a fabulous wedding it was! It was the first time at an Orthodox ceremony for most of the people there and I, for one, was quite fascinated by the ceremony and the priests singing the responses. Monica was telling us the next day that the priest was shaking as he doesn't normally have to conduct any part of the ceremony in English. I did have a smile when he welcomed us to the "weeding".

I had to work hard to suppress giggles, thanks to the small children behind us. In a bid to keep 3 young children amused during the ceremony their daddy was very quietly going through a picture book with them.
"Horse" said dad
"Horse" came the reply
"mumble" said dad
"SHITE" came the rather loud response
"Cow" said dad
"SHIIIITE" was the plaintive wail
By this time I was having to dig my nails into my palms to stop the giggles!!

Stephen had already bonded with Kenny (Adrian's brother in law) who was taking the photos and who had even more camera equipment than Stephen. I can only feel sorry for Elaine his wife, if she - like me, gets to carry it about! Stephen was taking loads of photos too, and between them they got a lovely set of photos. Kenny and Elaine were also exceedingly useful in a "follow that car" kind of way when it came from getting from the church onto the M8 to get to Ross Priory!!

The reception was wonderful. It was so good to catch up with all the Strathclyde University folks whom Stephen used to work with. Its too easy to forget that it was 17 years ago we left!! I was shocked to find that Helen's cute little daughter was now 21 years old!! Scottish water must be good for the skin as Helen doesn't look in any way old enough to have a 21 year old! She has barely changed at all.

The band were excellent too. It was ceildh, but now as you'd normally know it! They did all the traditional dances, but mixed in very modern music. So, for example, there would be Iron Maiden during the Virginia Reel (but not in a head-banging way). Very, very clever musicians indeed. (Have just googled The Big Shoogle - check out their My Space page for some music clips.)

To add a little frisson of excitement, Stephen managed to misplace his car keys. Hopefully this will teach him a lesson about putting things down behind him.... When the bridal car arrived at Ross Priory he'd dumped all his keys and camera equipment on a table at the top of the steps to the entrance in order to take photos. Someone helpfully swept everything up and took it inside...but they must have shoved his keys in a sporran or pocket - out of sight, out of mind! Thankfully I had my set of keys so we were okay, and thankfully Adrian got a call in the morning to say they'd turned up, and by a convoluted route we got them back to Stephen's mum so all we had to do was detour back to EK to collect them on our way home on Tuesday.

Our third stop was bonny Edinburgh to see even bonnier baby Leo....and the rest of the family too, of course! Poor Eve was loaded with the cold, so we were a fairly sorry lot coughing and sneezing away! It was funny as I'd had a dream that Leo was talking (in sentences no less!) and he is talking - just not in a language that we understand as yet! He chatters away quite the thing! Chad had taken a video of him chattering and we showed it to him. Leo's face was screwed up intently watching himself, then suddenly he burst into smiles and giggles. He was obviously telling jokes!! This was borne out by the fact that, from the video, we could hear Chad saying "You sure can deliver a punchline little fella". How funny!!

The very happy couple



The wee cutie (and Leo!)