We went to the beach! And other weekend adventures

Yesterday we went to the beach. Not the nice, convenient North Atlantic beach less than two miles from our flat. No, no! We drove all the way across Scotland to the West coast and the Irish sea, and walked along the beach there.

Cedar Avenue is just a few thousand miles that-a-way!

It was SO worth it.  Firstly, the beach smelled right. You know that wonderful sea-weedy aroma that tells you this is the ocean, not a pond? We were immersed in it. Note: we were immersed in the aromatic air, not the ocean. We did not actually touch the ocean - we already knew it was ice cold, so why check again?- but we did enjoy walking along the beach near the water's edge. We also threw a small ball into the sea several times, to the delight of a small white West Highland terrier. Jumping into the ice-cold (and amazingly clear) water, and swimming through the approximately two inch high wavelets to retrieve a ball and drop it hopefully at Richard's feet seemed to be the focus of that little dog's existence, at least for those few minutes, and we enjoyed it too. We would have struck up more of a conversation with its owner, only she was not in the least interested in chatting, but watched us carefully to make sure that we stole neither her soaking wet dog nor its soaking wet ball.

Those are shells, piles and piles of shells

The beach was covered with hundreds of thousands of shells. I may or may not be exaggerating if I said there were a million shells lying on the beach. The water had washed them into piles. It was not possible to take a step without walking on shells, although there were a few more thinly distributed areas between the piles. I have always been a bit of a shell collector, but then never end up doing anything with the pocketsful of shells I take home, so I firmly told myself  'No!' as we started walking on the beach. I repeated the 'No!' several times as we walked along, less and less firmly, and managed to resist keeping any, although picking some of the most beautiful ones up and admiring them for a minute or two before putting them down again did not reduce temptation.

We did admire their colours and the delicate lined patterns on the shells though.

I (Louise) am in charge of the mail at the mission office. We rarely send packages on to missionaries through the mail, preferring to send them to Zone conferences or with missionaries who happen to visit the mission office, but we have been accumulating rather a lot recently, so decided to visit the Paisley Zone and deliver the contents of the Paisley box to the missionaries in that region. That was our excuse for the trip to the beach. I (Richard) planned our westward route on the basis of the various missionary addresses, and we meandered all over the countryside, taking back roads wherever possible. If you travel directly from Edinburgh to Ardrossan, where the beach was,  it is about 80 miles and a less than two-hour journey on the motorways, but we managed to spend most of the day wandering around in our brand-new car.

Brand-new car? Oh yes, a couple weeks back the missionaries came down from Orkney with their old car (Church sells them when they have 50,000 miles on them) and we traded our 'old' car (7000 miles on it) for theirs and they headed back to the far north in what was now their 'new' car.  They managed to collide with something and damage the paintwork within the week, btw. We drove their old car around until Friday 13th, when the replacement car arrived and we swapped out. It's not nearly as exciting as it may sound, since this car is exactly like our original one, same model, same colour, same everything. It even has the same out-of-date gps maps built into it. It does have a new car smell, so theres's that. However within the first 24 hours several birds have decorated it and so it looks old and grubby already.

The picture does not do the valley justice

We did not precisely plan our trip back to Edinburgh, except in the sense that we agreed that we would just drive along and if we saw anything interesting, we would stop. We ended up stopping at the Spirit of Scotland Sculpture. - We saw a sign for it and off we went. Richard will describe it more fully but it is situated in one of the most beautiful rural valleys that I have ever seen, overlooked by Loudon Hill.

Nor this one, but we liked it!

Then we went to Craignethan Castle, not altogether uninfluenced by the fact that Historic Scotland, which owns/runs the place, takes great pride in maintaining spotlessly clean restrooms at all of its sites. We paid £72 for an annual Historic Scotland membership, which gives us free admission into all of their sites. I commented to Richard that the free parking and good restrooms just might all on their own justify the cost of membership!

Craignethen pictures

An important aspect of Craignethen Castle's defensive design is that it is perched on the edge of a cliff, so all your enemies have to climb up a steep hill to reach you. You can see the cliff in the second picture. the castle is on a jutting-out crag and the cliff protects it on three sides. Unfortunately on the fourth side there is a hill overlooking the castle, which you can see in the picture below. 

After that we saw a couple of potentially interesting stops, but we were tired, so we went home instead. We had already done some work on today's Primary lesson, but there was more to do. (Have we mentioned that we are teaching the Valiants in Primary for the foreseeable future? It  is an 'assignment" not a 'calling'. Missionaries are not allowed to have other 'callings.'

We were tired enough when we got back to the flat that we put off the last Primary preparation until this morning, got everything ready and went off to church. We arrived five minutes before sacrament meeting, to be greeted by the Bishopric counselor who was in charge today (Bishop out of town) and asked us if we would speak in sacrament meeting. He gave us the theme and we sat down on the stand, all ready to prepare our talks during the opening hymn. Actually, we gave okay talks, by which I mean nobody mentioned that they were relatively unprepared, and I don't think anybody noticed. In retrospect, it was nice that we weren't asked in advance, as we would have had to forgo our delightful travel day to prepare talks. This way we just had to think and pray fervently for a couple of minutes.