It's Been Awhile. . .

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted to the blog. Those dogs were the sweetest Cavalier Spaniels.  We so enjoyed our stay in Nancy's house in Strathaven. While in Strathaven, we visited the Riverside Museum, The Glenlee (a tall ship), and Auchentoshan, a whiskey distillery.  The museum and the Glenlee were such fun and had free admission.  Transportation is the focus of the Riverside Museum. Both the Riverside Museum and The Glenlee were interactive and child friendly.  As former teachers, we really appreciated that the children we saw there were having a blast. Various types of transportation throughout history were represented, such as cars from amusement park rides, vans, and horse-drawn streetcars.

The Glenlee Museum is a tall ship that has been restored and returned to Glasgow from Spain.  It was definitely a hit with the kids. They could swab the decks, move cargo from the hold to the upper deck, and participate in activities provided by the museum staff. There was even a play area below deck that one of little boy aboard referred to as "a wee play patch".  It, as was the Riverside Museum, very well done and interesting. 

You can't come to Scotland without visiting a whiskey distillery.  We visited the Auchentoshan Distillery.  The tour was very interesting and informative.  We found out that this distillery uses Jim Beam barrels for the first stage of the distillation.  It then goes through two more distillation processes before the distillation is complete.  According to our tour guide, Auchentoshan Whiskey is the only triple distilled whiskey made in Scotland. We had a really great time walking around Strathaven.  We found a charity shop (aka thrift shop in the US) and bought souvenirs that will remind us of Strathaven.  We found a little Wedgewood trinket box and a cross stitch sampler that someone had lovingly done of Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer's Apprentice.  We had lunch at a little restaurant called The Old Smiddy.  At one time it had been a blacksmith's shop. Chuck was the adventurous one that day and had a cheese and pickle sandwich.

I just had soup.  

We did run into a little trouble on Sunday before we were to leave for our trip to Ireland on Tuesday, July 11.  I received an email from our next house/pet sit people.  One of them had become ill and they had to cancel their holiday which meant that we had no assignment when we returned from Ireland.  I knew from our email conversations that were very nice and conscientious.  They were very upset that they had to cancel our stay and were worried what we were going to do during that time.  Chuck and I got on the Trusted Housesitters website and began searching for assignments for dates the end of July through the first week of August.  It took us about two hours of weeding through all the available assignments to find twelve that we liked and met our needs.  We updated our profile and welcome letter for the application and began sending out emails. Before we could finish sending the emails to apply for the assignments, we had a couple from Chester ask us to stay with Poppy, their little dog.  We accepted and the crisis was averted.  Trusted Housesitters to the rescue!

We said goodbye to Nancy and the Cavalier Spaniels and made the journey from Scotland to Chester, UK to meet Jayne and Simon and Poppy!  We stayed the night at a nice hotel called the Cheshire Cat, met Jayne and Simon for dinner and the next morning we were off to Dublin, Ireland.