Tuesday A mostly travel day today. We said goodbye to Felicity and Florian and headed to the bus and train that would eventually take us to Brugg. Not a typical stop for someone touring Switzerland however Dierk had a meeting at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland where he is teaching. While at his meeting, Deanna and I walked around some ancient Roman sites including the remains of a large Amphetheter.

Sunday We arrived in Frankfurt safe and sound. The plane trip was as expected, long, cramped and diffucult to get any sleep on, but it was fine. After a fairly quick stop at immigration, we made our way through the airport to find our box of goodies. It too arrived intact with the minor alteration that it had been opened by customs (looked to be in Calgary), the contents searched and repackaged.

Saturday Deanna and I are headed to Europe for two weeks! July isn’t our usual time to travel but I have an opportunity to attend JCrete and it didn’t take much convincing to get Deanna to come along. Since we’re travelling all that way, we decided to spend an additional week in Europe. When I mentioned what our plans were to Dierk König (@mittie), he offered to put us up at his house and play tour guide for a couple of days.

Monday Our last stop on our trip is the the city of London. We have four full days and we tried to pack it full of sight seeing as well as seeing some shows at the theater. We’ve been to London briefly in the past but this trip I was looking forward to exploring London. We started our week by hopping on a bus and heading towards the TKTS booth in Leicester square.

We flew back to the U.K. landing in Gatwick where my friend Andrew picked us up. I’ve known Andrew for a few years, both of us attending an open spaces style conference in Crested Butted Colorado over the years. Andrew has been very patient answering lots of questions for me while I was planning our trip. I was really excited to introduce him to Deanna and to meet his family.

Wednesday Flight from Stansted to Amsterdam We decided to take a short break from all things British and head to Amsterdam for three nights. Amsterdam has been on my list of places to see for quite some time and with flights from the U.K. being relatively cheap, we hopped on an EasyJet flight from Stansted Airport (just North East of London) and fly to Amsterdam, less than an hour away.

We said good bye to Edinburgh and headed south to Harrogate. Probably not a town you’ve heard of before, most of the U.K. hosts in our B&Bs had never heard of it. Its not too far away from York and the home to Gillian and her family. Deanna first met Gillian over 30 years ago as a pen pal. Deanna’s grade four teacher was the daughter of Gillan’s teacher. They exchanged letters for many years.

Sunday After passing a very restful sleep in our B&B, we awoke to a grey (but no rain day) in Edinburgh. We were treated to an exceptional breakfast, the best on our trip so far. Deanna had Belgium waffles with heaps of fresh berries and I had eggs benedict. Fortified we headed out and walked to the Royal Mile which is the area of Edinburgh that links [### Sunday

Friday Today was another travel day, though not nearly as epic as Wednesday. We said good bye to Kyleakin and headed towards Inverness. The morning was quite misty/foggy but after an 30 minutes or so of driving, we were out of the bulk of it. We couldn’t even see castle Eilean Donan as we drove by, so dense was the fog. We made our way to Fort Augustus which is on the southern tip of Loch Ness.

Wednesday Today was the big travel day of the trip. We left Keswick shortly after 9:00 am and headed North. Driving pretty much non stop to Kyleakin on the northern tip of Skye. Door to door it was 311 miles (500 km). We drove around Glasgow, briefly getting tangled in some construction and once off the motorway we made our way through some very dramatic landscapes. After being in England, Scotland particularly the farther north we traveled became more remote and desolate.