Tag: photos
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Black Spout Waterfall and Blair Athol Distillery
We enjoyed our last day in Pitlochry and are all very sad to be leaving. I highly recommend this little village as a place for an enjoyable family break. This morning we went for a short walk to Black Spout waterfall. It’s a 60 m high waterfall just next to the village of Pitlochry and…
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Balmedie Beach
We had a superb day today. We booked one of the Co-wheels cars to try out and went to Balmedie Beach where I went for a swim in the North Sea. We drove one of the electric cars parked very close to our home. We have a swipe card which unlocks the car from 5…
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A pic and should healthcare be free?
I took this photo of a church on Union St this morning because I found the colours really striking. The blue-grey of the sky and the gentle sunlight shining on the church spire made me want to whip out my camera and capture it as I raced to a 9am appointment. I went to the…
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Cairngorm Mountain, Aviemore
We awoke today to the loveliest day I’ve ever seen. It snowed overnight, so there was a fresh coating of the powdery stuff everywhere, and then the sun came out and the whole world seemed to sparkle. We managed to get up to Cairngorm Mountain but only just as they didn’t open the road until…
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Aviemore, Scotland
Snows transforms the outside into one giant playground. Every hill becomes a slippery slide, every twig a potential arm for a snowman, and every flake of snow a potential snowball for tossing at loved ones. Kids love it, I love it. My long suffering husband doesn’t love it quite so much. Walking around is like…
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More snow!
It snowed a bit again last night and I was very excited when I saw it this morning: Ben was even more excited about it than last time: It was beautiful!
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Park Güell
I’ve had a headache for the past 24 hours which pain killers are not killing and so there was only one thing to do: go for a run. It sounds counter-intuitive but running often alleviates headache pain for me. So this afternoon I ran up to Park Güell, a lovely park with some architectural features…
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Aberdeen’s amusement park and extreme wealth
Elizabeth turned 5 on New Year’s Eve. We didn’t have a party for her this year and instead took her out today to the amusement park on Aberdeen’s waterfront. Yep, Aberdeen has an amusement park right by the sea called Codonas. Personally I think it’s a god-awful waste of good real estate but who am…
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Curling in Ballater and the Royal Station Museum
This morning I went for a run around the golf course in Ballater. The roads and pavements in the village have icy patches which aren’t visible with the coating of snow they got yesterday and so it can be slippery running around the streets. The grassy golf course seemed a safer option. It turned out…
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Linn O’ Dee
FossilCycle pointed out in the comments on my post yesterday that we were just down the road from the Linn O’ Dee when we visited Braemar. If you Google Linn O’ Dee you’ll see this is a place worth visiting. So we drove back to Braemar today, a drive I would happily repeat because the…
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Christmas in the Cairngorms
Christmas Day in the Scottish Cairngorms looks like this: Lots of people said to me before we moved here that we’d be shocked by the number of people and the amount of traffic. Maybe this is true for the rest of the UK but not here in the north-east corner where the roads are extraordinarily…
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Santa, reindeer, and snow!
I got my Christmas present early today in the form of snow! No, it’s not snowing in Ballater but we drove to the village of Braemar – a gorgeous, gorgeous place – and then up to the ski field at Glenshee. It was only about 30 minutes away by car but I was driving and so…
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Stone circles and whisky
Today we went in search of some stone circles. Humans have lived in Aberdeenshire for thousands of years and there are lots of important archaeological sites here including some strange and intriguing stone circles. They don’t really know what these were used for but I’ve read they may have astronomical significance and/or they were used…
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Marischal College, Aberdeen
It’s a beautiful day in Aberdeen today. I had to run some errands in town this morning and I took these photos of the very gorgeous Marischal College. It’s the second largest granite building in the world, and is owned by the University of Aberdeen and leased to the city council. Apparently much of the…
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Newtown Grafitti
My father-in-law, Mike, died earlier this year but before his death plans were in progress to take some of his 29,913 photographs of Sydney and exhibit them. A documentary is being made about Mike by the very creative Rachel Jordan and she also wants to make these exhibition plans a reality. You can read more…
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Newton Dee
There aren’t very many off-road cycle paths in Aberdeen but there is one very good one: Deeside Way. It runs along an old train line from Duthie Park all the way out to Ballater, a total distance of 41 miles. Unfortunately the line is no longer used by trains; it was closed in 1966. But once…
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Plants that are longer than they are wide
In the interests of promoting gender equality in blogs, I thought I’d dedicate a blog post to plants that are longer than they are wide. I took these photos last weekend at the Duthie Park Winter Gardens:
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I’ve got Busby back!!
Busby finally arrived today. He’s been at the hospital (= bike shop) in York having some work done. We took him out for a spin. I felt very wobbly at first as the longer frame takes some getting used to and I haven’t ridden him for 10 months now. But after about 15 minutes or so I…
