Scotland: golf + more

Jason here.

One of my goals of our time living in Europe was to go play golf in Scotland. As things have been drawing to a close... I began to get nervous this wouldn't happen. How can I live only 3 hours from the birthplace of golf and not go experience it?!?!?

So...

In October, Kevin Fortsch (pictured above) and I played 36 holes of golf there!!! He flew from DFW to London and then took the train up to Edinburgh. I flew in the afternoon from Madrid straight to Edinburgh... (for 22Euros!)... arriving at about 6:30pm.

The first adventure was driving a car on the opposite side of the road. At night. In the rain. With my GPS barking orders at me. Quite honestly (and Kevin will agree to this fact), I was often driving on the right (wrong?) side of the road and putting our lives at risk. I love cars and driving, so this experience was a real hoot. Remember how you felt when you first started driving and had to think about EVERYTHING? That was me!! The biggest challenge was the shifting with your left hand. I was often going from 1st to 4th and such. Crazy!! My rule of driving was, "just do what other cars are doing". When we were alone on the roads... it was not pretty. Roundabouts in the opposite direction. Foreign! Love it.

Kevin and I left Edinburgh and stayed at a little hotel in the country. Fish and chips #1. Uneventful.

On Friday morning (well, for Kevin it was really midnight 'body time') we left our hotel and began driving towards our chosen course.

Crail Golfing Society

http://www.crailgolfingsociety.co.uk/

We had a 45 minute drive to the golf course in the morning... and we met some of the local wildlife in the process. On a two lane country road, a young and misinformed deer proved that cars are heavier and stronger than animals. No... I did not hit her... she hit us!! I saw her near the left side of the road and slowed considerably while moving from the left side to right on the roadway (strange, yes) to be further from her. As we came along side her... she decided to show her pals how fast she can cross a country road. She slammed right into the side of our little rented Kia. I'm sad to report we didn't ship any deer meat home as she was ok and shook it off like the little rugby-player she must be... she then left us to go tell her friends about some rude Americans she met who cared nothing about her... just that little white ball up ahead. Thankfully, the car was unharmed (hey, it's a rental!) and we had an extra-clean spot on Kevin's side of the car with a little bit of her hair... otherwise, no harm done.

(sorry, no pic... little deer are fast boogers and we were itching to get on the tee-box, so chose not to pursue her further)

yes... this is a golf story... I promise...


So we make it to the golf course. WOW!! The course is right on the sea (with a castle next door, see the pic to the left) and is GREEN and beautiful. It's a grey, cold, windy day... so there aren't too many people around. Those who are there are super friendly and are speaking English, yet I'm forced to REALLY concentrate to understand them. Foreign! Love it!

We bought a few things in the Pro Shop. Rented our gear and headed for the tee box. Our plan was to play the New Course (actually new... like 11 years old) in the morning with pull carts and to play the old course (about 175 years old!!) in the afternoon, with Caddies.

We are off! Here are some pics of the early going...


















I hadn't played a round in over 2 years... so things were more than a little rusty for me. Kevin is a good athlete and golfer and (he might disagree?!?) played quite well! A good shot for me is one where my ball is findable. :-). I think I scored a 105 on the first 18. Something in that range. Not good!

The most interesting thing we experienced on the first 18 was a WALL! No kidding. In the middle of the fairway was this ancient mossy, stone wall. Crazy. Kevin drove right up to it (good and bad) and I was a about 3o yards from it. Here are some pics.













We completed the first 18... and it was GREAT. In a word, peaceful. There are no electric carts. No noise. Just the course and the wind and the fun of hanging out and talking with Kevin while losing golf balls in the rough. We passed a few golfers on the course. Some of them had their dogs walking with them. Nice!

We took a break in the Crail Restaurant and enjoyed a great meal and view of the North Sea and the Old Course. Fish and chips #2. Below is a pic of our view during lunch!

The old course was VERY cool. In a word: Caddies. We decided to indulge a little and have a caddie for the 2nd 18. I'd never had a caddie before.

I... ummm... highly recommend it.

Jim and Ian were both members of the Crail Golfing Society and wonderful retired Scottish gentlemen.

While Kevin might have played another 18 holes of golf after this one... I was quickly wearing out! So for me... while the 2nd 18 was very much about golf... I honestly enjoyed walking and talking with Ian equally as much. He had retired from a Steel Mill mgmt/exec position in Glasgow and had a very interesting life. I enjoyed spending the time with him and appreciated his skills at finding my ball in the most ridiculous of places!! There were more than a few times he would say something to me and I heard him well... but still didn't understand what he said! It was GREAT. The funniest thing he said was to tell me, "You see that cow up there next to that barn? Aim in that direction." (they were beyond the course boundary)

I regret that I didn't get a good picture with of him.


Here is an "action shot" of Kevin and Jim. I think Kevin was saying, "Yes lad... please get the recommended club ready for me... I'll be along as soon as Risley finds his ball... yet again." lol...

In the end... I can't say I know my score on the 2nd 18. Likely north of 120. OUCH. Kevin and his driver became good friends... and he was smoking the fairways. I'd guess he was in the mid-90's. ?? Not sure.

Hard to sum up the whole Scotland golf experience. Much like other things in Europe... there's just nothing like it. Several times we literally had the sense of people 100+ years ago walking this ground and doing what we were doing. I found myself wondering what they discussed... what their lives were like...

In the end, I am SO THANKFUL that Kevin took the time away to come over. It was AMAZING. I would highly recommend it to others!! I can't believe we did it. What a great experience!

St. Andrews

After we finished golfing, we drove up to St. Andrews and walked the 18th hole. Amazing. Here's a pic of the 3rd hole and the hotel next to the 18th. It was getting dark... so my pics of the course didn't take. Bummer!

Thanks for reading about our adventures in Scotland!

Jason

Thanksgiving in Paris!

Dan & Ruth came to visit us during the week of Thanksgiving. (see the last post here for what we did the rest of the week) We enjoyed a "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner with 150 friends at our church on Sunday before Thanksgiving. So for Thanksgiving itself we went to Paris :-) Dan & Ruth had never been and we were happy to show it to them!

I am still blown away by the fact that we found ourselves in Paris so many times these last 2 years. It is truly a magical city!! It was our first European city to see and it is still our favorite. One of the cool things about this trip was that the Christmas lights had all just been turned on - it was magical! 2 years ago when Jason first started this job, he told me about these teardrop lights on the Champs Elysee - and it was so exciting that I got to see them! We got to stay on the rue Cler again - such a great street in a great neighborhood.



Thanksgiving Day, I headed off to see a friend, Deb, who lives in Paris, while everyone else went to see Notre Dame. Then we all met in the garden of the Tuileries near the Louvre for our Thanksgiving feast. We had gathered the ingredients for the picnic on the rue Cler that morning. And it was truly a picnic feast! French cheese, fresh bread, Spanish wine, dried meats and fruits. Yummy!! And best of all was the atmosphere and company :-). We also agreed that the prep and cleanup of Thanksgiving dinner couldn't be beat! The birds were happy to help us out with the cleanup. :-) Katie was soooo excited that one actually landed on her hand!

After eating, we visited the Louvre again. Highlights of this trip were seeing ruins of ancient Assyria - artifacts from the time of the captivity of Israel described in the Old Testament! It was very mind blowing!




The next day, Dan & Ruth took all 3 girls up in the Eiffel Tower while Jason & I wandered the streets of Paris. It was cool to get to discover some new areas that we had never seen before. We also saw the site of Princess Diana's sad car crash. After we met up again, we took the metro to the Champs Elysee. We enjoyed a yummy snack and then wandered down the beautiful avenue. We were still there when the lights went on - it was magical! We also found a fun Christmas market to browse. This ferris wheel was in the Place de la Concorde, where once was found the guillotine.

A funny story - you can take the Americans to Europe, but you can NOT make them suave Europeans... Katie and Jason actually pulled one of Katie's teeth inside a cafe on the Champs Elysee. Yes, I was dying of embarrassment. No one seemed to be staring at us.... but I'm sure we were the talk of the place after we left. :-) Ah, memories :-)


A definite highlight of the trip was Friday night - my friend Deb had helped us find a babysitter, and even allowed us to stay at her apartment for the sitter and kids to have more space. So the 4 adults got to go out to dinner - it was a true treat!! We enjoyed a several course meal and such great conversation (remember the theme I mentioned in my last post? :-) ). The guys topped off the evening with a couple of Cubans as we walked down the Seine. Ruth snapped this pic - gotta love those completely candid shots!!

Saturday, the guys took the girls back to Madrid while Ruth & I hit Les Puces - a famous flea market in Paris. The area was quite dodgy :-), but the flea market was great! We enjoyed a great day of shopping and laughing with some great keepsakes!

Sunday when we got back, the Christmas lights had just been turned on in Madrid as well. So we headed downtown for a mostly driving tour of the lights. It was a great way to end a great week :-)

France

Now for the grand finale of the "20 Day Trip"! :-)







We wrapped up our vacation by meeting some friends in Paris. These are French friends we met in Madrid, who moved to Dubai in March. They have a 5 year old girl just a little bit older than Katie and a 3 year old boy. Katie was sooo excited to get to see her friends again and to have someone to play with. We got to stay at our friends' parents' amazing 400 year old house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the oldest suburb of Paris. It was a wonderful town and we enjoyed having coffee on the square and being spoiled a bit by her parents. It was so refreshing to be in a home with a family after 2 weeks of traveling! We enjoyed a fabulous meal with fabulous desserts - quite appropriate to kick off our time in France. In France, as in Italy, it is really all about the food :-) In Spain, the pastries look pretty but usually taste blah. In France.... oo la la!! The fruit one looks a bit prettier, but the chocolate one won by a mile! :-)

After this lovely morning in Saint Germain, we headed off to the Loire Valley, where there are many castles. On our way to the condo we stayed in, we stopped at the Chateau of Chambord. It was a very beautiful castle. It has a corkscrew staircase in the middle of it - 2 spiral staircases intertwined so that 2 people can ascend at the same time and not pass each other. You could just catch glimpses of the other person through breaks in the walls. It was really cool. After quickly touring the castle (we got there just before closing time!), we had a lovely picnic on the grounds behind the castle. Somehow roasted chicken, fruit, cheese & French bread taste sooo much better that way! The kids were able to play together as they ate = big fun!!

The next day we headed out to see the Chateau of Chenonceau. This one is much more grand and dramatic, especially because it spans a river. It was beautiful to see the reflection of the castle in the water! This was actually the dividing line of occupied France and non-occupied France during WWII. They smuggled people out of occupied France through this castle!

We also enjoyed the beautiful gardens of Chenonceau and enjoyed an amazing lunch at a restaurant in town. It was a wonderful day! Here's our toothless girl near the castle (and someone's lovely orange shirt :-) )

I'm finding myself short on words to describe what we did in France - we had a wonderful time, but what we saw was truly secondary to just spending time with our friends! It was priceless to have so much time to be together and catch up on each others' lives. We are so thankful that God has given us such friends in such a short time here in Madrid! We didn't really even begin to see the castles that there are to see - there are a BUNCH of them! We really just enjoyed the time together - and now we have a reason to go back!

We stayed in the town of Loches in a wonderful condominium. It was perfect to have room to cook, eat and talk without sitting on our beds :-) The town ended up being really neat in its own right - so our last day together, we spent exploring Loches. This is the view out the window of our apartment! It was really pretty! There was a castle in town as well (cool to visit, though not so photogenic as this building - we never did figure out what exactly this building is :-) ). So we explored the town and finished the day and our stay in France with a lovely meal at a creperie. A perfect ending for a perfect time!!

Austria

Week #2 of the "20 Day Trip" found us in Salzburg, Austria. I knew after the craziness of trying to see as much as possible in Germany, that we would appreciate settling in 1 place for awhile. So we rented an apartment in Salzburg for a week. We had such a nice week, playing games and resting in the midst of more sightseeing. We had a beautiful view of the mountains from our apartment. The only downside of where we stayed was the commute to town - it was too far to walk and we never figured out the public transportation. So instead we had to search for an impossible-to-find parking spot each time we wanted to go downtown! But it was a small thing :-)

One thing we were excited about in going to Salzburg in August was being there during the yearly Music Festival. We knew we couldn't drag Katie to any symphony performances, but we hoped to find some part of the festival to participate in. We stumbled on a free concert in the square by the cathedral the first afternoon we were there! The next day we also attended a performance of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" for kids. Now the funny thing about this performance was that it was a teaching video for kids - but completely in German. The Magic Flute is also a very strange and confusing opera - even if we did speak German. I'm not sure any of us have been that bored in a very long time! :-) So as soon as we got home from the performance, we found info to explain the opera on Wikipedia (here if you're interested :-) ). We also were able to find a CD of the music from the opera and we have all been enjoying it since.

Of course, the real reason we chose to settle in Salzburg was to see all the Sound of Music sites and go on the tour! It was sooo fun to catch glimpses all week of things from the movie! It was definitely one of those things on my "bucket list"!! Katie's imagination has also been captured by the movie so she enjoyed it as much as I did. And Jason is such a good sport - I think he enjoyed it too :-) After all, "16 going on 17" is kind of our song - since that describes our ages when we started dating :-) The tour was a lot of fun - I think a highlight for me was driving through the Austrian countryside in the bus singing along to the music from the film! (near where they filmed the opening scene) It was just as beautiful as in the movie! So above, here we are at the gazebo where Ralf and Liesl danced, the house & lake they lived in for the movie, and the fountain in the center of town where Maria sang "I Have Confidence."

Mirabell gardens is the place where the children & Maria sing "Do Re Mi" and dance all around. So we enjoyed reenacting that a bit :-) So in order, these pics are the gardens themselves, dancing around the pegasus fountain, racing down the lane like the children do and finally, posing like the statues!

















Our only disappointment with the tour is that we didn't get to visit the Abbey! From their promotional materials, it makes it seem like you get to go inside it. But no. They just drive you to a good spot for taking a picture of it very far away :-). So Nonnberg Abbey is the red roofed church in the picture. Maria von Trapp actually was a novice there and she and the Captain were married there. (as we discovered, what happened to the Trapp family in real life was not always exactly what happened in the movie :-) Close, but not quite!)

We did do things in Salzburg that were unrelated to the Sound of Music :-). We thoroughly enjoyed a tour of the Durnnberg salt mine. Salzburg was made to be the city it is because of the salt mine that brought the rulers great wealth. The salt mine tour was great - we got to do many of the things that the miners used to do: ride the train into the mine, walk through the mine tunnels, slide down a wooden slide to get further into the mine, and ride on a boat to get across the salt lake underground. It was really really fun!



In the town of Hallein close to the salt mines, we stumbled across a Silent Night museum. The composer of Silent Night, Franz Gruber, served as parish priest in the church in Hallein and he is buried there. We had no idea we would find that so it was very cool. The museum even had the guitar that the song was first played on!





As we were leaving Hallein, Katie lost tooth #4 - now she is truly toothless and singing "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth"!! Apparently, the tooth fairy knows where Austria is as well. :-)








When we took the Sound of Music tour, we really enjoyed seeing the Lake district near Salzburg. So one day, we drove out to explore the lakes. We rented an electric boat that went a blinding 8 kilometers per hour (about 5 mph). Amazingly, Jason & Katie swam in the freezing cold water - even though there was no ladder to use to get back into the boat and we had no towels. They loved it though! It was just so refreshing to be out on the lake (we miss our boat in TX!), especially surrounded by beautiful mountains! The only thing that would have made it more enjoyable for Jason would have been if he had his fishing pole :-)











Our final stop in Salzburg was to visit Hellbrunn Castle. Now it is basically part of the city, but it used to be a getaway palace "out of the city" that was built in the early 17th century. The coolest thing about the palace is its grounds - the Prince-Archbishop who designed them had an extensive knowledge of waterworks. He put trick fountains all through the garden and used to surprise guests with unexpected showers. All the things we saw were original from that time period and the tour was really fun. The guide would surprise us with a trickle (or deluge!) of water all over the place - for instance from a head of antlers posted on the wall! I thought the funniest one was a table in which the prince put fountains through each seat. If his guests got too bored or boring or sleepy or inebriated or ??, he could just turn on the fountains to wake them up again :-). The only seat that did not have a fountain was the head of the table :-).

So that's Salzburg - we had a great week! The last part of our trip was France - coming soon!