Scotland

Hello all,
I wanted to give everyone an update. It has been a bit since I wrote. When I stated this blog I thought I would write a little bit like every other day. Kind of like a journal that I could look back on 10 years from now, but that just has not happened.

So where to start? First, sorry there has been no recent "Savvy Travels" videos. We were filming one in the Orkney islands at some neolithic sites and we ran into some bad weather. I mean really bad. Rain and about 30 MPH winds. We were also stuck out there in it for about 45 mins with no shelter of any kind. We literal hide behind one of the neolithic standing stones to block the wind and waited for the bus to show up. Anyway, we hope to film sometime new soon.

So we had a great time in the Orkney Island and saw some amazing things, a lot of which dated back to before the Pyramids. We were also hoping to see the Northern Lights but no luck. It was just too cloudy the whole time. Getting to and from the Orkney's was not a lot of fun. One really winding 3 hour bus ride there and back we took a pretty rough 7 hour ferry ride through the North Atlantic. There was some motion sickness from the trips to and from but we survived. We hope most of our travels are by train from here on out.

We picked our place to stay and lay low for a bit and that place is Inverness. We are 2 week into a 3 week stay here at Inverness and then we move on. It has been nice to settle into one place for a bit and Inverness is a cute town and of course the COVID issues here are pretty under control.

As you might have heard that the UK became the 1st country to approve a COVID vaccine and they started giving it out today. Some people have asked us if we will be able to get the vaccine and the short answer is no. We would be too far down the priorities list and we are not planning on being in the UK much longer.

Where to next? Well I am glad you asked. We will be heading to Bath, England for about 2 weeks. Bath is about 2 hours from London and is in the area of Stonehenge and Oxford. After that, on Dec. 29th we fly to Lisbon, Portugal. After Lisbon it is still unclear but the plan is to explore Portugal, Spain, and a bit of Morocco. When go north to Paris for a bit. Then we plan to fly out of Paris back to the US.

So that is your update. I could write so much more but I am trying to keep these somewhat short and it 11:15 pm here and I should go to bed.

Good night all and please forgive all the typos and mistakes that I didn't catch

Miss you all,
JT

Sorry, I know we have not posted anything for a bit.

So I am going to start writing some just little short updates about what we are doing and what is coming up. Now, Shelley is the writer in the family, so she takes care of the more detailed and better written stuff. I am just going to write some quick notes, so please forgive me if things are not written well or if I misspell stuff, cause that happens all the time.

So lets see if I can do a quick update. We have left London and are in Edinburgh Scotland. We spent about 10 days in London which was great but expensive as hell. I am glad to be somewhere a bit cheaper and it has also been a bit more relaxing here.

We only have a week here. We were going to try and stay at least one more week but the place we are staying was not available so we are just going to head to Inverness on Wednesday. In case you don't know Inverness is in the Scottish highlands and is up near Loch Ness. It's about a 2 hour train ride.

As you know COVID is ramping up all over the world, including here but still no where near the levels in the US. We have been hoping to find a place to just settle in for an extended stay but we have not found one. We are hoping that Inverness will be that place. They have very low COVID cases and if we like the town and the place we are renting, we might try to extend our stay. The other options are to head to even more Northern Scotland in hopes of seeing the Northern Lights or maybe coming back to Edinburgh and staying several weeks.

COVID makes it very hard to plan ahead because restrictions and rules keep changing. As of right now we only have things planned until Nov 11th. We really are making this up as we go.

So that is my update. I hope that was not too long. I am going to post one later that I wrote about getting into the UK but that one is long and I really should have Shelley look at it and help me polish it up a bit.

As you can imagine Scotland is just beautiful with weather like Portland. The people here have been great as well as the people in London. They have been sweet and very helpful.... Of course, we tell them we are from Canada.

Good night all. I hope to post another update when we get to Inverness. Hopefully we will know what our next move is by then.

JT