Champion Haggis and the Hot Tub

We had the luxury of going on holiday again with my family to a place called Kinpurnie. It's about 15 miles outside of Dundee (if you decide to Google Map it). The building you can see here is actually divided into 2 cottages (East/West Newbigging) so there were some of us in each house. Thanks to my oldest brother Neil we had his projector set up in one of the living rooms hooked up to an Xbox. The other half-house served as the more social/eating house.

The houses each had a hot tub which was great fun to be able to just go whenever we wanted. I don't know if it was quite as nice as Park City, but that is not quite comparing like for like.

Emma's talking is really coming along leaps and bounds. At 18 months she can already say all of our names and tell us what sounds animals make as well as count to 12. Quite impressive! She had lots of fun singing "5 little monkies" with Alyson, waiting every time to do the "snap" of the alligator. For a full explanation you will just have to ask Alyson. It was great to spend time with my family again.

We made sure to make use of the facilities despite the weather. We did actually get a few sunny days which was nice. We also had the nice surprise of my aunt Sally coming across from California. It was a rather impromptu visit, but great for my mum as not all of our family had managed to make it on the trip.

It was Alyson's first time to Dundee, and we didn't see as much of the city as we might have liked. Anyone who has listened to me for long enough knows that I don't hold too high an opinion of Dundee though (or Glasgow for that matter). We did get to have an all-you-can eat Indian buffet. We also visited the home of Scottish champion haggis (though we have yet to apply our own taste test).

Our next adventure is not too far away. We're headed to visit my brother Jamie in London and that will hopefully have another lively blog entry in store.

SAS Training

So we managed to make good use of yet another groupon. This time it was to play paintball for 3 GBP. Unfortunately the discount is somewhat short-lived as most of the paintball places here don't allow you to bring your own paint. They charge the equivalent of $12 for 100 paintballs.



We purchased a bunch of them since $5 each seemed like such a bargain. We originally had 6 people coming with us, the number dwindled once we realised the cost of paint.

It took us a couple of games to really find our bearings, but we finished on a high in a capture the flag/bridges game. Both Alyson and I managed to take one of the flags (there were only 2) and we were playing with guys who had clearly gone paintballing before.

The bruise above was from one of Alyson's several paintball inflicted welts. She is quite proud of her war wounds.