Matt and Kat Brown

Our Scotland jaunt started last night when arrived at Prestwick Airport after only a short delay from our Ryan Air flight. We picked up our hire car and made it into Glasgow for the night without incident. Our hotel room for the night  (Ibis) was serviceable (and a carbon-copy of the room layout of the Ibis hotel in Bratislava!) if not particularly cozy and we were glad to get on the road in the morning.

We picked up a pay-as-you-go 3G internet pack in Glasgow so that we could use Google Maps and some navigation applications in conjunction with the GPS on the new Android phone that Matt got for Christmas from Google. While Kat battled with the 3G modem Matt took a wrong turn and ended up driving for 30 minutes in completely the wrong direction! Eventually we managed to get both the 3G and our bearings sorted out and got out of the Glasgow area (in the right direction this time) just before lunch. Having the GPS and Google Maps as we drove along was very interesting and useful, although the Internet eventually cut out as we got into the really nice scenery leaving us with just the GPS.

The landscape was beautiful, lots of lochs, grand mountain scenes and plenty of frost on the ground. We were glad for our hats and gloves! We had come prepared and managed to find and log 2 out of the 2 geocaches that we attempted along the way. By 3:30 it was starting to get dark and we were only just half way to Inverness. We captured some beautiful sunset photos looking west across Loch Linnhe around 4pm and then drove the rest of the way to Inverness (alongside Loch Ness) in the dark and gloomy fog. No sign of Nessie!

Stay tuned for more news tommorrow (maybe, depending on time and internet access :p)!

Another year is nearly at an end. It’s been a good year for us (and a busy one) with plenty of highlights and very few lowlights!

We’ll be enjoying a quiet Christmas day this year, making phone calls back home, eating some good food and packing for our flight on the 26th when we’re off to Scotland. We’re taking a week to see the sights and enjoy the celebrations in Edinburgh on New Years Eve. It’s going to be cold, very very cold – or so we hear from everyone we’ve mentioned the trip to! We’re hoping for a few days of fine weather – especially for the fireworks on New Years and so Matt can get in a few good photo shoots with his new tripod and the digital SLR camera.

We sent out our Christmas newsletter this week. If you haven’t received a copy already we’re sorry and it’s not intentional. Most likely we just don’t have your correct email address in our list. If  you’d like to receive (very) sporadic email updates from us then just send us an email to say ‘hi’ – then we’ll have your address and we can add you to the list

We’ll keep you posted with more news of our travels in the New Year. Sending out Christmas goodwill to everyone and hoping you all have an enjoyable and not too stressful Christmas break.

Nolliag Shona Duit (Merry Christmas) !

On the way to our work Christmas party earlier in the week, I was discussing the state of public transport in Dublin with a colleague and he suggested I watch this video, made four years ago, that nicely summarises transport in Dublin.

I enjoyed it, hopefully you will too:

It’s now four years after that video was made, and I could only see one aspect of it that has improved in that time. The busses now accept a smart card so you don’t have to carry the exact change every day, except there are a limited number of smart card types available so you end up paying more than your usual fare if you want to use one for a short trip, and they are not rechargeable, so you have to buy a new one every week.

Dublin Transport. Not There Yet.

Despite that, I’ve been really enjoying Dublin the last few weeks, and it is not like any New Zealand city really has any sort of decent public transport either!