The McKenzie's Blog…

It was only a short time spent in Bonnie Scotland, but each time I go there I find the draw to return stronger and stronger.  It’s always been part of my life long plan to return to my patriarchal ancestral home of Scotland.  While the big cities aren’t dissimilar to the big cities anywhere else in the world, it’s the smaller towns and villages out in the county side that are the real draw for me.

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Mega Scotland 2010 was very good to say the least. We’d got ourselves checked in about 11am or so I suppose.  We had a bit of a lazy morning on Saturday, but who can blame us after the 10hr marathon drive from Heathrow to Kinross.

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The trip to Mega Scotland (GC1XDQ0) for Gord started with a flight from Canada on Thursday July 29th. I started at 8am with a drive to Heathrow to meet him. then it was what turned out to be a 10hr drive to travel just 400 or so miles from Heathrow to the camp site in Kinross, Scotland. Even I, a Veteran of 8 yrs of UK driving, was amazed at how painfully slow the drive was.

We arrived at the camp site about 9pm and had everything set up by about half 9 or so. A quick trip around the camp site to see is about and scope out the facilities, then it was back to meet the neighbours and chill out by their fire.

The sleep was great, I used my new down sleeping bag, it was very warm and comfy. Only problem, on a clear morning the Sun in Scotland shows its face about 4am… Needed my siesta glasses but could be arsed to get out of my bag to get them. Won’t make that mistake tonight thought haha

Saturday: first on the list besides getting showered will be to find food. Then its off to the kilt makers for Gord and I. Then to the actual Mega Scotland event.

I will post more later including some pics I hope.

Cheerio from Scotland

Posted by Wordmobi

In the quest to cut the weight of my backpack load I’ve been looking at my cooking setup.  I have a number of nested pot sets that we use for camping and one that I bought for back packing, however as light as they are they are still bulky and rather heavy for what you are using them for.  Having done a lot of searching on the net for what has worked for others I came up the short list of things.

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We are back home now and glad we decided to not to stay an extra night. The threat of possible bad weather (rain) was enough to send us packing today as was originally planned. On the way home we drove through a hell of a rain storm that brought along with it a 10 or 11 degree drop in temperature. It went from 22C to 11C in about 5 mins.

I’ve finally got the photos posted on Flickr now. The easiest way to see them all is by going to the Camping 2009 Collection.  You can see we had a great time

While we were away I was blogging using my Nokia N97 phone with the use of Wordmobi (WordPress Blogging Tool) and QuickOffice 6.  Entering text into Wordmobi is fine but there’s no spell check available in the tool.  So, the process I used was to write up the posting content in QuickOffice and saved as a Word Document.  Once it was complete and spell checked I’d copy the text and paste it into Wordmobi.  This then allowed me to post direct to the blog and add the tags and whatever I wanted.  All in all this process was very good and worked well for me.  I had my laptop with me including my datacard and power source but never once turned it on during the week we were away.  I was able to do everything I needed to using my phone.  Other apps I used were the Facebook App that came installed on the phone and my favorite Twitter App – Gravity.  I would have been online using Nimbuzz, but for some reason I just couldn’t get authenticated, but it worked fine from home, not sure what happened there.

I’ve received a lot of positive comments from people via various paths about my blog postings while away.  Thanks for the comments and thanks for reading them too!

I really must try to blog more often… perhaps with the new found process using my phone I will feel more like it.  Since moving from Windows to Linux full time on my laptop it’s not as convienent to use my one beloved Windows too, Windows Live Writer … truely a great application for blogging on WordPress sites.

Thank again for following our holiday and reading the site.

Sleep was very welcome last night. Yesterday was a long day with packing and setting up again. The only complaint about this site is the road noise from a dual carriage way that’s about 300 or so meters away. But it was tolerable, just disrupts the idea of camping.

It was a bit of an early day again today, Lisa woke us by filling her sleeping bag again, rather then getting up to use the bucket we’d put out for just such cases. Oh well, hung everything out to dry on a line for the day.

Today we spent the day in Southwold. parked up at on end of the town and only paid £3.80 for all day parking, brilliant for a tourist trap really. First stop in town was the Pier. This was not like most piers in the UK… It had an arcade but was small and clean, but the pier lacked the usual tat and flashing lights and head pounding noises. It was very clean and tidy with shops selling decent looking products.

After that we headed into town and walked about 2 miles around the streets and looking in shops. We needed to get the girls some swimsuits or shorts so they could play in the surf. Once the new shorts were acquired it was time for food. This proved to be the most difficult task of the day… First it was 1425hrs when we started the quest for food. The first pub stopped serving at 1400, the next place stopped at 1430 (missed it by that much (insert any number of corresponding scene from “Get Smart”)), finally found a place. The timing was perfect, I was preparing to beat several sea gulls to death for a meal.

Fed and watered it was time to get wet. We headed down to the beach. Its a very long and fairly well maintained and clean. It was very windy down on the beach and as a result we all ended up getting several layers of skin sand blasted off haha and people pay big money for that sort of treatment, fools. We spent just over an hour at the water I suppose. The girls had a great time and got well soaked and cold… Warm water my ass but they had fun blue lips and sand in places it shouldn’t be haha

Time to head back to camp, but first a stop at a Tesco first for a few more supplies. Dinner was bbq pork chops, boiled carrots and potatoes and a tossed salad.

Right now as I type this Yuki is in giving the girls a showered to get the sea, sand and stink off them

Next will be a short sit around the neighbours camp fire with them and roast some marshmallows and make some chocolate banana’s in the fire… Then bed time again. We were going to see about staying Friday night too but decided to pack it in tomorrow… The weather is suppose to turn tomorrow night and no point temping fate We’ve had a good run this week, no point pushing our luck.

Its been a great week away. We’ve had some great times and some not so great but all in all it was positive. Being home in my own bed tomorrow night will be very nice indeed. Cleaning all the camping gear wont be much fun but it needs to be done I guess. The gear will be packed away for another year (or in the recent case, two years as we didn’t get out at all last year).

The girls are all in bed now and I’m just finishing off this posting and having a cup of hazelnut hot chocolate, yummy. Then check some emails and off to bed myself. Time sure does fly these past few days… 10pm comes ever so quickly. Normally I’m struggling to stay awake at home this time of night, but not out here… All the fresh air is going to be sadly misses when we get back home…

Right, enough of this babbling, time to close the post, finish my hot chocolate, count some stars and then to bed.

Night all!!!

Oh yeah, once we are back I will be uploading heaps of photos… Got about 400 or 500 to sift though and see what’s useful and get them uploaded.

Posted by Wordmobi

Day four started out very very very early when one of the sproggs sprung a leaked and attempted to float out on the air mattress. Wasn’t nice to deal with at 4am.

Then it was up about 8am or so to get cleaned up, fed and packed up. Breakfast was some left over sausages and a hamburger and some scrambled eggs that were collected by the owners the day before, YUMMY!! By 1115 we’d cleared the camp site and were on the way back to Diss for the laundrette, thankfully it was open.

We arrived at the new site, the Orchard (IP13 0SJ). I assume at one time it was, there are still a couple apple trees around, not eating apples though. While Yuki and I got busy setting up camp the kids went off to play, they quickly acquired their new victims … Err found a couple of kids to befriend that are both sisters and only 6 months difference from our girls. Turns out they just down from north of Peterborough and arrived an hour or so ahead of us, very nice couple they are.

We didn’t feel much like cooking tonight so headed into a town called Woodbridge. We found a very nice pub called The Seal. The bar keep turns out to have schooled at Queen’s Uni in Kingston so had a bit of a chat about that.

Back to the camp site… We finished setting up the tent and all. Then it was over to visit with the folks we’d met earlier. The girls had gone go to theirs and were “helping” with the fire and roasting of marshmallows. stood around for about 90 mins chatting then it was time for the “glow stick shower”. Every Wed and Sat nights after dark they assemble all the kids/teens near the shop and after a very loud count down from 10 they hurled about 100 of the thin flexible glow sticks into the air from a couple different directions. All that can be said about what happened next is… WOW… The kids had a blast collecting what they could. After that was done they handed out the joiners for the glow sticks.

That brings me to the present… 2230hrs and I’m wiped… Again. Blogging this not from my chair under the stars but from bed. Our neighbours have also just returned, not overly concerned the others could be sleeping but never mind.

Time to post this and sign off for the night… No ideas yet for tomorrow… Likely head to Southwold to the beach or something.

Sorry for taking so long to post this tonight tata from Suffolk!

Posted by Wordmobi