Nothing, and Old Machar

We are a little behind with the stories of our lives; somehow sleep has been more important than typing lately.  Tonight, however, we managed to leave the office about 5:30 pm, and promised ourselves that we would do a little blogging before the night was over.

Cast your mind back to a spot of ancient history - the weekend of of May 5th and 6th. Monday May 7th was a bank holiday, and el Presidente decided that the mission office staff should have the day off. He announced this with a truly benevolent smile on his face, and even even told us a few days before the weekend, so we could make plans. Louise managed to text every young missionary in the mission, to warn them that the office would be closed Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and if they needed train tickets or anything else would they pretty please contact us by Friday morning, so we could sort things out before we all left. She entered the numbers into her mission cell phone organised by Zone and Area, so they won't have to be changed every transfer, and next time a general text needs to be sent it won't take all morning to set up. (Emails are easier to send in bulk, but most of the missionaries would not see their email prior to Monday, so that wouldn't help much. Sisters C and G had already planned a trip to Orkney that weekend, along with a senior missionary couple, so they left about noon on Friday. And our plans for the weekend? Nothing. We planned to do as little as possible. Glorious, glorious nothing. No castles, no long trips, no rushing about. Actually, as soon as we realised that we had a three day weekend, we probably would have planned a last minute trip somewhere - maybe Ireland - only one of our Primary children was getting baptised that Sunday, and we felt we needed to be there.

Saturday was wonderful. We slept a little later than usual, went for a long, lazy walk in the park, and then took a nap. Then we did some cleaning and laundry, and took a nap. After that we went shopping, buying a couple of shirts for Richard (Not white, and not blue, thank you very much) and  one for Louise, and then went wandering along the seafront just a couple of miles from home. Then we came home and, just for a change, finished the day with one more nap, and then went to bed and slept through the night. The hectic activities of the day were interspersed with meals and a bit of reading. Altogether it was just what we needed, and by the time Sunday rolled around we were feeling rejuvenated, refreshed and ready to overdo things again.

So we planned a trip to Aberdeen on Monday, the same one we put off the previous week. We popped in at the office on our way home from church on Sunday to pick up all the mail for Aberdeen missionaries, and spent part of Sunday evening preparing a picnic lunch.**

Monday morning we set off bright and early (6 am to be precise) on the approximately three hour drive to Aberdeen. There was not all that much traffic on the road, and we enjoyed a peaceful drive, hugging the coastline wherever possible. We delivered the mail, along with some candy treats, to the Zone Leaders, male and female, and then set off to enjoy the rest of our day, By the way, female zone leaders are called Sister Trainer Leaders in our mission.

We arrived at our main destination, Old Machar.

St Machar's cathedral, where some of Louise's ancestors were married and where their children were later christened, is an exceedingly ancient and equally impressive edifice. It has been used as a church since about 586 AD, its denomination changing from time to time with the politics of the day, and has stained glass windows and a reverent atmosphere. The churchyard is large and very crowded, which is not surprising, considering how many centuries worth of folk are buried there. Louise wondered around both inside and outside, exploring in some depth, while Richard made friends with the woman who was curating (?) the building for the day. It turned out she had visited BYU a couple of years before to attend the graduation of her niece. Anyway, Richard's friendliness had the purest motivation, but really paid off. When he asked her if there was any sort of map of the churchyard, she actually searched for and found one. In 1986 a church member had transcribed and indexed every gravestone, and we reaped the fruits of his labours. We have not yet found links between our Harveys and the Harveys buried there but we will keep looking. Of course, the gravestones only go back a few hundred years, but there may well be several layers of graves. 1400 plus years is a long life (if you'll excuse the expression) for a churchyard.

After a while we were getting cold, so hopped back into our heated car and headed off to Inverurie, where Violetta Tweedale Gibson, who married William Harvey at Old Machar in 1823, was born. Sadly we had not done much homework on Inverurie - it was a bit of an impulse trip - and the churches we found there did not seem to be of sufficiently ancient date, but we hunted through the churchyard of St Mary's anyway.

After we gave up on Inverurie, which is a lovely little town with a beautiful name, we decided to break our last remaining resolution for the weekend and go visit Scone Castle, where Macbeth and most other Scottish kings were crowned.  So we set our GPS for Scone and off we went. When I say 'off' I mean 'off the beaten path', if not quite off the map. Our GPS took us the strangest route, all beautiful and narrow back roads, rising and falling, twisting and turning through the glorious Highland countryside. This went on for mile upon mile and hour after hour. The GPS time estimates were, we think, based upon the national speed limits for the roads we were traveling, ie 60 miles per hour. No one in their right mind, however would have gone more than 40 mph on any of these roads, and even 40 would have been pushing it on some of them. It was a breathtakingly beautiful tour of rural Scotland in the spring and we were enjoying it, only after a while we started wondering whether we would make it to Scone before that castle closed. So Richard whipped out a trusty cell phone to check what time Scone closed that day, (Louise was driving at that point) only to discover that it would not close at all that day, because it had not been open in the first place. So we relaxed and just enjoyed the interesting route without any time pressure.

We did make it home to our flat well before dark, but that is remarkably easy at this time of year, when it is light outside until 10 pm. It was a lovely end to a lazy weekend, and we have an amazing old cathedral to add to our memories.

** Picnic lunches: One thing we really miss from the US is eateries that provide salad type meals, like Cafe Rio or Costa Vida. There are some pleasant restaurants here, but if you want something quick or take-away, you seem to be limited to fish-and-chips type foods, burgers, or Chinese take-away, which we have not yet tried. It seems the only way to be sure of getting anything light or remotely healthy, like a salad to eat, is taking something light and healthy, like a salad, along with us.