Scotland!

It's vacation time again, Mark, Martin and Stuart (now known as Cederic as he didn't want us to use his real name) are off to Scotland, more specifically, the Isle of Skye. The end goal is to see the northern lights which is a bit of a gamble, but you have to try these things.

We picked up the hire car last night, we'd booked a Focus and so they gave us a Golf. Mark's only requirement was that it had a real handbrake and not a stupid automatic one, to which the guy at the car rental place confirmed that it was a proper handbrake. The car was fine, the boot space is going to be tight but it had a nice stereo and was practically new, although it took Mark a little while to get it going as he couldn't figure out how to turn off the stupid automatic handbrake thing.

We then went out for a nice curry with Keith and returned to Cederic's house to watch England destroy San Marino. We clearly hadn't thought through the concept of having a curry the night before all sitting in the confines of a car the next day for 8 hours.

An fairly casual start thr next day began by watching the F1 qualifying before looking out of the window to see 3 inches of snow. This could be an interesting journey as the weather people were predicting 15 inches of snow along our way. Still, we didn't panic and went for breakie.

We then tested our tetris skills by getting our luggage into the space. We stocked up on essential items like water, chocolate and a sledge.

The first leg of the journey wasn't too bad, the roads were mostly clear although there was repeated warnings saying "snow plow slow down". So we dashed off in search of this speeding snow plow to help get it to reduce it's speed.

After about 4 hours we reached Hadrian's Wall, although it turned to just be Adrian's concrete wall, so we pushed on to find the real wall. Once there we paid an extortionate fee to look at a wall that is no longer there. They did have some good slopes for the sledge though, it seems the Romans didn't expect an assault by sledge.

After invading England we headed out and soon found ourselves following a police car. However, the 'pol' was missing from their 'police' sign, so it just read 'ice'. It turns out that you're not to flag them down in such circumstances and ask for two 99s and a Tiptop.

Before we left the home land and entered the uncivilised lands of Scotland we stopped for some afternoon tea. Here we lapped up the last of the English traditions by eating lots of cake.

Soon we were in Scotland who clearly were still reeling from their defeat against Wales and every other nation ever in every sport ever. We arrived in Stirling where we were to spend the night. First night holiday rules apply, so we're about to go out and get stupidly drunk. Ironically thus is the one thing the Scottish may beat us at.