As a followup to the thread in which I announced that my sweetheart and I are now married, here is the story of our honeymoon.
This, too, is long.
Rick and Brynda’s honeymoon
Aka – roadtrip around Great Britain.
We had been planning to get married for a while and as part of the plans, we had decided to have our honeymoon in Britain. This was mainly because most of my family could not come to the wedding so we wanted to have a reception for them (two parties for us too, cool 
)
We landed in Manchester early on Wednesday morning and as luck would have it, my parents and sister and brother-in-law landed 20 minutes after us, so we all caught a taxi home together. The ride took nearly 3 hours because a lorry had shed it load on the motorway and we had to take back roads home – us and everyone else who was on the motorway.
We set off for Scotland the next day. Our first destination was Edinburgh. My dad let us borrow his new car so we did not have to rent one (he had prolly driven it a total of 40 miles, I put just over 1000 on it before we left for home). It was a really nice gesture.
The journey up to Edinburgh took about 7 ½ hours, mainly because Brynda kept pointing out the sheep dotted hillsides and wanting to stop and look. Where she is from, the sheep don’t outnumber the people 
In Edinburgh, we stayed a nice little place called The Thistle, which we found online. The first evening we went to a small pub on the waterfront and had a nice meal, before retiring to bed (we were tired, jet lag and all that driving don’t ya know 
). The next day we decided to do some sight seeing, so we went into the center of town. We went to Edinburgh Castle and a little place called Camera Obscura which is on the street leading up to the castle entrance. It has all sorts of cool stuff to do with lenses and cameras and holographs and stuff. The camera obscura itself is something in the roof which uses mirrors to see things on the street below and is over 100 years old. The castle was pretty good, lots of royal relics and stuff. After that, we went up the Walter Scott memorial (for those of you who, like me, don’t know he is a famous Scottish author – he wrote Ivanhoe, among other books). The memorial is a tower with carvings of 64 of his characters on the outside. To get tot the top, which has a great view, you have to go up 4 narrow, winding staircases – a total of 289 steps. On our last day in Edinburgh, we went to Hollyrood house, the palace where the royal family stay when they are there. It was another nice place, full of old stuff. It was interesting to look around. We also went to a place called “Our Dynamic Earth” which is a kind of museum showing how the earth developed over the last 4 billion years. It was pretty cool, too. The last thing we did was the Star Wars exhibit at the City Art center. It was 5 floors full of the original designs and story boards for all the films so far, as well as costumes, details on how some of the sound effects were created and other things. Way cool!
The following day we set off to go to Glengarry Castle. It is on Loch Oich, 7 miles away from Loch Ness. Brynda loved it. There were sheep grazing about 30 feet from the castle and it was very picturesque. After we arrived, we decided to go and see Loch Ness. I had to drive down a small road, barely wide enough for a car and a half with passing places every so often. Thank god we did not meet a coach coming the other way. The scenery was amazing and we took loads of photos. I got to skip stones on Loch Ness, too. No sighting of Nessie, though – Brynda thinks I scared it away by skipping stones. We had a wonderful meal at the castle that night, too. Brynda fell in love with hot smoked salmon.
We then set off for Oban the next day. The first day we looked around the town and got settled into the room (had a bit of a nap after all the travelling, you know how it is ). The second day we went to visit the Isle of Mull. The boat was rather small, but it was a pleasant trip. The castle on the island (Duart Castle) was spectacular and it contained some local history which I found interesting. On the way back it was raining though, so we got pretty wet but we did go by a seal colony on one of the little rocky islands nearby. Despite Scotland’s reputation, that was the only rain we had the whole time though, for about 3 hours that afternoon. After we had dried off (back in the room again ) we went out to dinner at a local restaurant where I had venison for the first time. It was ok, but I was not that impressed. Because it was still light when we finished our dinner we decided to go and see McCaig’s Folly (or McCaig’s Tower, depending on your POV). It is a large circular wall with archways in it (think cylinder). It is pretty big (100 feet in diameter maybe). Legend has it that a rich local started to build it in the 1800s to give workers something to do during the off season but he ran out of money, which is why it is unfinished.
For our final day, we wanted to see some wildlife so we went to the Sea Life center where they care for sick animals (mostly seals). They also have an aquarium there. It was pretty cool. We got to watch the seals being fed. We did want to find another wildlife center, but after driving about 10 miles along this single track road we finally spotted a sign saying it was 3 miles back the way we had come so we decided to skip it. We had lunch at a really nice B&B off the beaten track about 10 miles outside of Oban. That afternoon we went to visit a glass shop and bought loads of vases and things to bring back for presents and gifts for ourselves. We had dinner at Ee usk (which we were told means “fish” and did mean more hot smoked salmon for Brynda) and that was it for the day.
The journey back was pretty uneventful, just long. The most notable things to happen were a short stop in Glasgow for some lunch (about an hour long) and we saw some cows crossing a footbridge across the motorway, which was rather amusing.
My parents hosted a party for us for all my relatives in England to come to on the Friday and then we flew out on Sunday morning. All in all it was a wonderful honeymoon. We want to do it again next year (I think we should have a honeymoon every year ), although we have an invite to visit my relatives in Ireland, so that may be on the agenda next time.
Rick