My FAVORITE non-people Pictures

Alright, this is it. After three weeks of travel and a lot of figuring out how to upload my pictures into my brand new and exciting freshly shipped Mac laptop, I have chosen five winners of my own personal travel photo contest. These aren't meant to show what any of the towns we visited are like, or how cool Brett and I look posing next to cool things, they are just photos I like.

Here they are, in order:

1. A feather on the sidewalk in Edinburgh

2. A tree and a cloud on Day One of the West Highland Way

3. Loch Lomond through the trees on Day Three of the West Highland Way

4. A red rose in the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens

5. A rainbow in Glencoe, Scotland

Castlerigg Stone Circle

When you awake to a rainy day in Keswick, Lake District, England, UK, you are presented with several options. You could

A) Roll over and go back to bed

B) Spend the morning visiting one of dozens of outdoor shops or tiny bakeries with names like "The Wild Strawberry" and "The Wholemeal Cafe"

C) Visit tourist information at Moot Hall, buy a brochure for a local hike, and then follow its seventeen steps to an ancient stone circle, 1000 years older than Stone Henge

D) Hop on the bus and go somewhere the weather doesn't change every 20 minutes

For Brett and I, the choice was clear. We donned raincoats, stuffed our brochure up one sleeve to keep it dry, and headed for the hills. After crossing a beck (turns out it means a stream) and following a path through the mossy woods, we emerged into higher country and the rain miraculously blew away into the distance, where we could admire it from afar. We dallied along, taking the above photos of sheep sheltering from the wind along a stone wall and of brown cows companionably munching grass and mooing back and forth with Brett. Finally, we reached a huge field and climbed in on stone steps over the wall to explore the stone circle. We had about ten minutes to take photos before the storm blew back and sent us home to Keswick in the car of two friendly fellow photographers.

Brett's take on the West Highland Way

The West Highland Way is a 95-mile long footpath running through classic Scottish landscape, by lochs (lakes), up into moors (marshland), and finally over proper windswept passes. As Betsy mentioned, sheep and rain were steady companions, and both give the Highlands its essential character and add to the drama of the hike.

The first picture above is Blackrock Cottage, at the foot of the mountain Buachaille Etiv Mor, the "Great Herdsman" of the mountains. It is cloaked in cloud behind the cottage. In the second picture, Betsy and I pose at the top of Devil's Staircase, the highest point of the hike. The third picture is a rainbow running into Loch Tulla. And finally a shot near Rannoch Moor, the largest uninhabited area in Britain. The puffy pants should tell you how windy it is, not how much I've been eating (which is quite a lot, though I resisted the haggis).

We're now back in London, staying with my college friend Christian, and preparing to move to Oxford for the summer. It will most definitely be nice to unpack and have a home, at least for a couple months.

More pictures from the hike and our overall travels through the U.K. will be available shortly on a Kodak EasyShare page. We'll put up the link as soon as we finish it. And yes, the wedding pictures too.

Betsy's Take on The West Highland Way

The West Highland Way is marked by dozens of brown posts with white thistles emblazoned on them. It cuts through forests, along the wide shores of Loch Lomond, through highland meadows and a vast moor, across the Devil's Staircase, through a final pass and down into Fort William in Northwest Scotland.

Our hike was a lovely one, though punctuated with some frustrating weather and the occasional cloud of voracious pregnant midges. We saw most of the beauty and crossed many of the miles of the way, though we did ride in a car and a couple of buses when necessary. I won't try to recap the whole experience, but I'll share a few of my memories.

Picture these moments...

On our first day we climbed over and through and across many fences designed to outwit sheep but not hikers, getting acquainted with the stepstile and the kissing gate in particular.

Late one evening after setting up the tent, we came across someone who was RUNNING the entire way as part of a race (the men's record for these 80 + miles was around 17 hours!). Kind of put the hike in perspective...

While Loch Lomond diminished behind us, we hiked up and up through a tremendous green bowl, sheep scattered on the far left reaches and birns tumbling down from the right.

Who would have thought those four other tents on the beach would contain such inveterate partiers? Several hour long blocks of pouring rain didn't keep them from mirth and merriment on all sides of our tent until after four a.m.

Nothing tastes much better than an apple rhubarb crumble at the end of a thirteen mile hike, unless of course it is so badly burned that no fruit is recognizable within its charred black mass. I sampled the good and the bad.

I met my first wild swan one morning as we hiked by its powder room (the edge of Loch Lomond). It fussed and rustled its feathers like the most fashion conscious teenager.

I'd tell you about all the beautiful sunsets and sunrises, except they all happened while we were asleep! We went to bed in pretty broad daylight, and woke up to it too. Welcome to the north country!