Moran Family Fun

We were so excited to have my parents come for a visit! They were the first people to come visit us in our new home here in  England - unless you count Madison coming home at Christmastime? Having a college kid is a whole different thing because she's company but not company at the same time.  Back to the big visit from my mom and dad. They got here during the second half of April and stayed until early May. If you're considering a trip to England, springtime is a great option. The weather was pleasant and the spring flowers were even in bloom. So make your plans for 2018, okay? They were with us for a while, then the two of them traveled to Harrogate to visit old friends for a few days, and then they came back to our place. Their visit was pretty low key. Some of the time they were here we were out sightseeing and other days we stayed closer to home. Without any pre-planning they happened to be here for Natalie's science fair, Emily's prom, a couple of squadron ...

Okay, so maybe one more post about Spring Break . . . I had forgotten about the things we managed to see and do on the way home! We decided to divide the drive home into two days because if there is any way to avoid eight straight hours in the car we're on board. Jared found a hotel in Durham where we could spend the night and only two kids had to sleep on the floor. Before we made it to the hotel there were a couple of stops to be made.  First we stopped for lunch in Jedburgh, a lovely town just ten miles from the border with England. We walked around until we found someplace to eat, finally settling on Simply Scottish, a little cafe with the best burgers we've had since arriving in Britain. After a little while at a playground, we loaded back up and set out for  Chester's Roman Fort , the most complete Roman cavalry fort in Britain. It was a beautiful sunny day, almost too warm and sunny to be running around the ruins of a Roman fort, but there was a scavenger hunt...

Yes, I am just now getting around to writing about something that happened almost three months ago.   Better late than never? The trouble is that I feel this need to document everything, but I want it documented chronologically, and then I struggle with making the time to sit down and write, so I have this backlog of events that I want to memorialize on here. This is the last Spring Break event I'll write about because this is really the last big thing we did during our time in Scotland and because I also need to write about the rest of April plus all of May and June.  Before we left for Scotland we did some research and talked about what we'd like to do while we were there. Jared and I both thought that climbing Ben Lomond would be a great way to spend one of our days. It wasn't too far from our hotel and the distance of eleven kilometers looked doable even for us. We were told to expect to take about three hours to reach the summit and another two to hike back down. ...

The one and only thing Emily wanted to see in Scotland was a heilan' coo or highland cow. Highland cattle are a Scottish breed of cattle with long horns and long wavy coats. They're these majestic beasts that have a serious cuteness factor because of their thick wavy hair. I'm not sure that we'd seen any at all, not even in the distance in fields as we were driving around until our last full day in Scotland.  Our plan was to take a ride on the steamship Sir Walter Scott (more on that below) but when we arrived at the dock we'd just missed one sailing and there wasn't another one scheduled for a couple of hours. Instead of hanging around Loch Katrine we decided to buy our tickets and drive to the nearest town to see what we could see. You never know what you might find and at the very least there would be a place to grab some food for lunch. As we were driving into town we noticed two separate woolen mill shops. That's not such a big deal as these th...

The next stop on our spring break list was St. Andrews, which is basically the home of golf. It's a beautiful seaside town with many golf courses, the most of well-known probably being the Old Course with the iconic Swilcan Bridge with the town in the background. The nicest thing about the Old Course is probably that you can walk the entire course if you want to and you don't even have to be there to golf. The course is open to the public and it's kind of cool to walk around watching people as they play golf by the seaside even if you're not a big golf fan.  Jared thought it would be cool to be able to say that he'd hit a couple of balls at St. Andrews so we made our way to the driving range and grabbed some clubs and a bucket of balls. And guess what? It was cool! Everyone had the chance to hit ten balls and, since we can't do anything without making it a competition, a prize was offered to the girl who hit the longest ball. I think the reward was a t...