The Mother Land: Scotland, England, Ireland and Home

It was the plan all along to spend Christmas in Europe with the family in 2015. Our unexpected move back to the US tried to put a glitch in this plan, but we combined our final apartment check-out with a family Christmas before going back to the states. Our daughter Stephanie and her husband John arrived a couple of days before Christmas and we met them in Rotterdam, one of their favorite cities, to enjoy the architecture and the nearby MarktHal. The area near the market was destroyed during WWII as both the Nazis and the Allied forces tried to take control of the port. It was slow to be rebuilt. John had been eyeing the MarketHal when it was just a concept. After a delay of 6 years in building, it was at the top of his bucket list to see the finished product finished in 2014. It houses 230 apartments and the shops inside seems to compete to have the best displays of fresh food, including seafood, donuts, Dutch delicacies, meat, cheese, as well as a great assortment of restaurants.

John rented an AirBnb at one of the cube houses near the Markthal, a very unique Piet Blom design, completed in1977 when the area was finally rebuilt. It was a hoot to stay in one of these houses, definitely the most unique place I've ever slept. We walked to a park before nightfall to see the Maas river, the old harbor, the Erasmus bridge, and the Kralingen neighborhood where historic preserved mansion stand next to student housing. The area had a definite vibrant feel.

We drove to Veldhoven and had a quiet Christmas and final days at our Europe apartment. We found a synchronized light show in someone's back alley Christmas eve with American music. We attended an English Christmas mass in Eindhoven Christmas day. We had dinner at our local Fine restaurant  with a surprise 4 course dinner with wine pairings Christmas night. We arrived at 6pm and left at 11pm. Christmas dinners out are popular in the Netherlands where Christmas day is usually a small quiet family affair. Santa (Sinterklaas) gets his own day December 5th when the children get all of their presents.

On Boxing day, December 26th, we packed out
belongings and headed to Schiphol airport with daughter Stephanie and her husband John to fly to Heathrow airport for Boxing Day or the second day of Christmas in Europe. We rented an AirBnb cottage for the group in Bath, England for 4 days and we would be joined by our other daughter Erin and her husband Seb who live in London. The agenda for the three days was to have family game night in the cottage, open presents for Christmas, take a walking tour of the famous baths and soak in the history of this place, explore the famous restaurants and visit Stonehenge. I imagined Mary Poppins in a few back gardens as we walked through the town.

Stonehenge is an interesting place. People have been trying for several
thousand years to figure out why it even exists. It was assembled in three phases starting over 5000 years ago by the Druids. It may have been a burial place, a ceremonial site, a pilgrimage or a memorial to connect with distant ancestors.  It contains bluestones from over 200 miles away from Wales and so also could have been a place for healing. I can't imagine the process to transport these large stones over 200 miles. In any event, it is delicate arrangement of  large stones laid in circles that are visited by thousands every year. I wanted to feel some spiritual presence as I do when visiting similar sites around Europe. I was left without that experience though I did see some interesting characters that perhaps attracted to the shrine more than I was.

Paul and I left the girls and their husbands in England and trekked off to Edinburgh for New Year's Eve and a short weekend visit to Scotland. We arrived early afternoon, dropped our luggage and headed to the ticket office for the New Year's Eve festival called Hogmanay. The office closed at 5pm and we bypassed interesting sites along the way to get there in time. We purchased a specialty ticket to Old Town Ceilidh (pronounced Kylee) but that also gave us general admission to other areas of the festival - the street dance. With tickets in hand, we went down the hill by the river to take in some of the Christmas markets that were still open. The markets resembled the ones we saw in Germany with carnival rides and an ice rink. We ate at the food vendors there, a crepe for myself (the only item without meat) and a sausage for Paul. We left to return to our hotel to rest up for the New Year's Eve festivities.

We found a pub across the street from our hotel in the Grassmarket area called the Cafe Royal to get a taste or twoof whiskey. Some locals wondered in and included us in their group. They intended to stay here for the night and admonished us that we spent too much money for the tickets to Hogmanay. We politely left them, headed to dinner down the street at the Last Drop where Paul tried "haggis, neeps and tatties" and I tried a version of their veggie burger with mash.  This is probably one of the best veggie burgers that I've ever had, made with eggplant, red pepper and chickpeas. I definitely won the night with a food choice. Haggis is a "pudding" made of sheep heart, lungs, liver with suet, oatmeal and onions, all contained in sheep's stomach. Who knows what "neeps" was. It was not much to Paul's liking.

We returned to our hotel to wrap up for the cold night
and set out to start our partying. We were among the first to enter the Ceilidh area. We watched the Scottish band warm up the crowd and soon found ourselves being included in a group of 6 for the Scottish dancing instruction. It resembled American square dancing somewhat with a little more arm movement. Paul and I negotiated the steps as best we could with cobblestones for a dance floor. We could see the potential for injury with a few more people and a little more drink. Around 10pm,  it became very crowded and we were ready to go on to the Street Dance part of the festival near the Christmas markets. The gates to this area closed at 11pm. We moved to an area we wanted to watch the fireworks over the castle knowing it would be hard to move around later in the night. We found a boulevard away from the music to get off the street, people watch and to jump around to stay warm.

The countdown began and the fireworks started right at midnight. It was a fantastic spectacle with the traditional Auld Lang Syne being sung throughout the light show with gusto. Scots Robert Burns wrote the song in 1788 and I guess I didn't realize until that night that it was even a Scottish song. We left for the hotel immediately after the fireworks were over and the crowd started moving as we did. At some point, I was swept off my feet and separated from Paul and I panicked at the crowd rush. Eventually, the crowd thinned and we made our way successfully home to start the new year. We earned our party merit badge.

The next morning, we started off up the hill to the Edinburgh Castle. As we entered the castle, we were awed by the view below and we were very curious about the history of the castle. We found that we didn't know much Scottish history either and we were very interested to learn about it. My mother's family was Scottish (Campbell) and Paul's family on the Nixon side was also Scottish.

The self-guided tour of the castle was very nice. We had audio guides to give
us a fairly complete history of not just the castle, but Scotland itself. After watching the cannon go off and three hours of looking in every nook and cranny, we left the castle and hit the historic woolen mill down the street. We found the family tartan for the Nixons easily, but didn't have enough family history to know which of three Campbell tartans were mine. We bought a scarf with the Nixon tartan on it. We found food on the way home and nestled in our room to watch the Fiesta bowl game, Ohio state and Notre Dame on Slingbox (no judgment here - we love American football).

The next day, we visited the National Gallery to see some Scottish art. All
museums are free of charge in the UK. After, we scheduled a whiskey tasting at the largest collection of whiskeys in Scotland - the Whiskey experience. This experience was something that Paul really wanted to do. I usually shudder when tasting whiskey with a mixer, I couldn't imagine a straight up shot. We spent some time learning about the different regions of whiskey in Scotland and the history of it's making. We tasted a whiskey from the region Islay, known for it's peaty aroma and taste. It was not to my liking. However, we also tasted Aberlour, a Highland single malt and it was fairly smooth. We got an additional taste of a 25 year Scotch and Paul really liked it.

We flew back to London to catch up with our daughters. Paul and John had to return to work the next day in the US and Stephanie and I were going to stay for a week to visit with Erin and Seb, as well as take a side trip to Ireland.  With Erin, we visited the British Library. I had no idea what I was in for! This was no ordinary library. The John Ritblat Room held many original articles, including the Magna Carta, Lindisfarne Gospels, Barcelona Hagadah, Gutenberg Bible, and a Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci. Manuscripts by some of Britain's most well-known authors are also on display,  including Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens, Shakespeare's 'First Folio', 'Alice's Adventures Under Ground' and Jane Austen's 'History of England'. I was surprised to also see original scores from Mozart, Handel, Chopin, and Beethoven. My favorite were the original lyrics for a Hard Day's Night written on the back of a 1st birthday card to Julian Lennon.

That evening Stephanie and I caught a flight to Dublin to
explore Ireland for a couple of days. We arrived at 11:30 at night and as it turned out, it was the night that the citizens of Dublin were coming back from a two week holiday to return to work. It was pouring rain and the lines were astonishingly long. We found our hotel on a quiet street near the castle and settled in for the night.

The next day, in the rain, we set out first off to the Guinness Storehouse at St. James' gate. We grabbed a croissant and coffee and walked by St. Patricks on our way but didn't stop - as if we were on a mission. Guinness was just the best place. It was laid out well, and after two hours of our self-guided tour, we hit the tasting room called the Gravity Bar, a total glass-walled room on the seventh floor. The views were amazing. The beer was even better. We took our time to look at the city and savor the taste. We left there and walked home in the rain and rested before our dinner at Fallon and Byrne. It is an upscale grocery store with a wine-tasting bar and restaurant downstairs. It was relaxed and the menu was simple but tasty. We stayed there for three hours discussing life and catching up. We then wandered to the Temple Bar to check out the oldest bar in Dublin. It was a Tuesday night, but very busy. There was an Irish band playing and friendly people at tables nearby. We finished the night in the hotel with a game of rummy and TV.

The next day, we found a little out of the way place for breakfast near Stephen's Green. It was called Bibi's cafe and it was a little cafe in a residential neighborhood. It was really nice, with a choice of oats, eggs, creative breakfast sandwiches, lemon tart, or yogurt. I couldn't decide between the homemade granola and yogurt and the lemon tart, so I had both. Stephanie tried one of the breakfast sandwiches and shared the tart with me. We left there and decided to go to Trinity University and visit the Book of Kells and the Long Room. The exhibit tells of the history of the Irish monk and why the book of Kells and others like it were so important to Ireland. The Long Room is a room in the Library that comes out of a Harry Potter movie. It houses numerous antique book collections and the effect of the room is very unique.

We visited the Dublin Castle after and was on the last tour of the day to visit inside. We left as it was starting to rain again. We decided on a early dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Temple Bar area so we could eat and get home early before the storm. We had a flight the next morning early back to London.

After we arrived in London later morning, it was a sunny day. We dressed for the cold and set out to find Shakespeare's Globe theatre. The tour took us into the rebuilt theatre. This structure was rebuilt along the river after the original theatre was razed during a fire. It was rebuilt without nails and exactly like the original theatre however. It would be fantastic to see a play there, which is offered April through October.

To wind up the London part of our trip with Erin, we arranged tea at Fortnum and Mason. It was fairly elegant historic tea shop and restaurant complete with a piano player. Our waiter told us about our options and the selection we made allowed us as many tea sandwiches, scones, pastries as we wanted and also a selection from the dessert cart. It was fun trying different teas with my daughters. I kept wanting to raise my little finger while drinking the tea and talking with my terrible British accent, but my daughters made me behave. We walked back to Angel area where our hotel was to work off the feast.

Saturday we had a date at the Prince of Wales Theatre to see Book of Mormon. My daughters weren't sure that this production was mother appropriate, but I purchased matinee tickets anyway and made them sit on either side of me. (Note - there were parts that were NOT mother appropriate). We enjoyed the date and rode the bus home in the rain. Sunday, we walked along the canals in the sun to Regent's Park, about five miles. Stephanie and left that evening to start our trip home.

It's funny how a place can make you feel like it's so familiar to you that you could call it home. The smells seems familiar, and the way people walk is a familiar gate. I noticed that my reddish hair was common place. Perhaps it is like home because it was the home of my ancestors and I carry parts of them with me. Maybe it was just the easy comfortable feeling of traveling with family. Familiarity is a deep kindness that allows us to be content whatever the reason.