The McKenzies' 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.