Four go wild north of the border UPDATED 6/23 About This Page:

[chezp]

Four go wild north of the border

Pre-trip report – part one: how this all started….

Dates: Friday 9 – Saturday 24 June
Adventurers: Me, Cheryl (44) and DH Mark (51)
Destinations: Lake District, England and all around Scotland!
Resorts: Too many to list here… it’s almost a new place every night…
Meets: our friends Mari and Raleigh from California
Celebration: spending time with our friends and celebrating my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary on 10 June

Let’s go back in time to the summer of 2007. That was when the Disney Magic made her first sailing across the Transatlantic and we were fortunate enough to be booked on the inaugural Mediterranean cruise out of Barcelona. We met Bruce (zazu) on the boards virtually, and ended up sitting with him, his wife Marta and some of their friends during the cruise. It was lovely to have a group of people to share dinner with, rather than being on our own. However, there was also a true moment of serendipity, which started so much else…

We were in one of the inside staterooms on deck 7 – 7627 to be precise. It was an inside stateroom, but it was all we could afford, given it was an inaugural cruise, and we booked quite late on, as we came into some money that we put to good use on the cruise. Anyway, one day we were just coming out of our room, and I looked up and was amazed at who I saw… I’ll let the trip report from back then do the talking at this point:

As we came out of our room, I saw someone who I thought looked familiar. “Deb” It was Deb Wills from All Ears Net and she was about four doors down the hall from us. I’d only said to Mark a day or two earlier that she was on board and perhaps we’d run into her. How funny to find out she was nearby – running into her during the cruise would be inevitable now!

We stood there and chatting for probably a good half hour and were joined by lots of other people, including Becky from Mouse Fan Travel and her DH Chris, Linda and Sandy, all of whom were staying in rooms in our area. How cool! We sort of all realised that it might be a noisy cruise and let’s just say that when we saw other people from our corridor while we were standing there, apologies were made in advance, just in case! It even turned out that we were all on the same dining rotation, so we’d be seeing plenty of them during the next 11 nights.

It turned out that Mari and Raleigh were there as well, as they’re good friends with Deb and Linda and Beci and Chris, and tend to travel a lot with them. It’s interesting, as I looked through the trip report, and couldn’t actually find one mention of the two of them, which is really funny, given we’ve probably seen more of them in the intervening years since than anyone else, just because every time we head to California, we always let them know our plans and then meet up.

That’s meant reunions at Disneyland in October 2008, August 2011, December 2012, and September 2015. When we told them that we were looking to book a cruise out of Venice in July 2014 on the Magic, they were instantly in, and when we went on to mention that we were planning on doing a road trip around Northern Italy when the cruise was over, they asked if we wanted some company. Hell

We always have an absolute ball with them. They’re just so much fun. Mari is definitely more the Disney fan than Raleigh, but like many of you out there, he happily goes along with Disney. However, I must admit I really enjoyed the Italy road trip, perhaps more than any other of our trips, as everyone was really in their element. It was just so relaxing, and so much fun. I planned the whole thing, and they happily went along with everything I planned, which worked perfectly for me.

During that trip, talk started to turn to perhaps doing another road trip. Mari and Raleigh said they really wanted to tour Scotland, and we said that we’d barely seen anything of the country. We were heading back there mere weeks later for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, but prior to that, we’d literally only spent a day in Edinburgh, and we knew there was so much more to see there. Since then, we’ve been back for two New Year celebrations, both with Hazel and her family and have certainly seen a bit more of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the surrounding areas, but despite that, I know Scotland is a huge country, with much more to see.

There was also the not-so-small matter of the Scottish referendum on whether to remain as part of the United Kingdom later on in 2014. I had said to myself that if the Scots chose to remain with us, we’d ensure we got up there to explore of their country on a road trip. However, if they chose to go down the independence route, that would present us with all sorts of potential issues, particularly border controls, which wouldn’t make a visit quite so simple. It was a close vote, but thankfully the remain camp won. A great shame the same couldn’t be said in summer 2016 when we got to the EU referendum.

So, after the result was known, we were set. Our Scotland road trip was on. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that when we started to make their plans back in 2014, we already had ideas for a few vacations… In 2015, we would be heading out on the Wonder for Mark’s 50th birthday to visit Alaska for a second time, and we already had a spring visit to Disney World booked. My long time friend threw a bit of a wrench in our plans by deciding to get married in September in Harvard, so we ended up with three trips to the States in a little over six months, and in fact came home in between the two September trips for just 10 days.

In 2016, I finally wanted to make it to eastern Canada, having wanted to visit Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Quebec City for the best part of 20 years. That was originally planned for November time, but another wrench in our plans was the tragic death of our friend Bill (LizardCop) and the wonderful idea of a meet to honour his memory a year on from his death in September. By this point, we also had a Baltic cruise booked, albeit not with Disney, much as we’d have loved to have gone on the inaugural UK itinerary. It was just too crazy expensive though.

So 2017 it was… we knew we wanted to go out of school holiday season, which over here is the last week in May, then six weeks from mid-July until early September. It was either September or June. However, I wanted to get back to the States for Christmas, so June made much more sense in terms of spacing our vacations throughout the year.

It was about this point that I realised it would be my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. As an only child, I knew we’d need to call in and see them either before or after the day, but when I checked the calendar, I found out that it fell on a Saturday. Ok, that works then, and as they’re in Cheshire in North West England, about halfway between where we live and Scotland, we can go and see them on the way up there. So that’s how our dates were set.

We would take two weeks, starting from Sunday 11 June, the day after my parents’ wedding anniversary, and tour as much of Scotland as we could. I did have a first itinerary that I went back and reviewed in the summer of 2016, and some of it didn’t work as well as I wanted. There was a lot more driving for Mark than I thought was fair. I loved the idea of visiting John O’Groats, which is the most northerly point of the mainland UK, having been to Lands’ End at the southernmost point already, but it was a stupidly long drive from the Loch Ness area, and I figured it would be overly commercial there.

If I was going to knock that out, it also meant that the short ferry ride to Orkney from that part of Scotland would be out of the window, but then again, we could also fly there from other parts of Scotland. Now if we could do that, that would open up the option of flying either there or to Shetland. Decisions, decisions….

So now you know how this vacation started out, and have the rough idea of the itinerary. From here on in, I’ll be capturing my thoughts and progress on putting this together using my diary system, so you’ll read things as they happened. Things may change (I have no idea as I’m writing this), but it’ll be interesting to see what does happen over the next few months…

Next: “you’re so much more knowledgeable than me”.