Pre-trip work!

 May 1, 2025   Second Day of Travel to Scotland!

We spent a comfortable night at the Holiday Inn and enjoyed a generous breakfast before departing at 7:30am for the airport. Lisbon Airport was poorly laid out, confusing to us seasoned travelers (so imagine poor Simon going through it alone! 😧), was skimpy on electronic boards with flight info on them, and had more duty free shops than seating at gates for travelers. But "EasyJet" airlines got us to Scotland safely after our 2 hour and 45 minute flight to Edinburgh. 

Now, we have arrived at our final leg of the trip and here we will stay for four weeks until we travel home to Allendale. There is a substantial shift in stress when you go from countries in which you don't speak the language to a country where you can read every food label, road sign, and can return to speaking in full sentences instead of caveman talk with foreign words. Let's be honest though, I have had to ask a Scottish person to repeat their sentence more than once, from the man ahead of us in line at the airport who was a Scot, to shop keepers here in Stirling. I'm curious to see how far I come in comprehension in another 3+ weeks.

Getting onboard EasyJet. 

On the loading bridge, waiting to enter the plane.

Goodbye Portugal.

Hello Scotland.

We collected Aaron, who had flown into Edinburgh 4.5 hours earlier, got the rental car, and drove 30 minutes to Stirling, Scotland. Rod had to adjust to driving on the opposite side of the road and did an amazing job! We stopped at a grocery store on our way to the Airbnb to pick up enough things to get us through tomorrow's breakfast. We were delighted with our new place, unpacked, walked uptown to order some Dominos pizza for dinner much to the delight of all the kids, and relaxed the rest of the night.

Aaron!! We haven't seen him for two months!

We have the bottom floor of this end unit. The blue car is our rental for the month.