Stratclyde and the seashore

I know it sounds like an unusual combination but that was our day.

This morning we joined the rest of the clan at Strathclyde Park to cheer on our cousin as she ran in the MND (Motor Neural Disease) fundraising run.  She finished in under an hour!!  Very impressed.  I think that it would have taken me double or triple that time to reach the end.  It also gave us a chance to spend more time with the family.  All of the cousins got dowon beside the water tossing in stones and laughing.  Exactly the type of memories I want the girls to have of our trip.

After a delicious lunch, it was back in to the park to visit the largeplayground.  I get some bad mommy points for forgetting to pack the girls boots and dressing them in new pink sweaters…which are now somewhat browner from the mud.  That said, neither girl stopped smiling the whole two hours we were there.  Even more important,  they consider their cousins as friends.  “you played with your cousins, right Elspeth?” “No!  I play my friend on the slide.”

It was lovely and sunny after dinner and it seemed like a waste to come back to our hotel and call it an evening so we headed out for a drive along the Firth of Forth (an inlet on the east coast of Scotland).  The girls were excited enough about having to cross a large bridge on the way over but I swear that their eyes almost popped out of their heads when the saw the even longer bridge we crossed on the way back.  We stopped between one bridge and the next in a small town.  The tide was out so we all clambered out of the car and walked along the seashore (never expected to write about being at the seaside on this trip).  Theyrustled about picking up stones and various shells.  We discovered that seaweed makes Elspeth nervous, much as grass did when we first came home.  The salt water smell in the air reminded me of out east.  As Glenn said, it was the type of Scotland that his dad would have loved to see.