Scotland, England and France

2001 - To Scotland, England and France

I've always been interested in genealogy. I've had the most luck researching my maternal grandfather's roots going back to 1659 in Cornwall, England and my distant cousin Ken shared with me his research on our mutual great-grandfather from Scotland. When he starting organizing a world-wide family reunion
to be held near Edinborough, Scotland, I was the first one to sign up. I was just barely pregnant with my second child, but gosh darn it, I was going!

We had previously taken our daughter to Mexico when she was three months old and it was a breeze. However, we had my mother along with us - so the odds were definitely in our favour - and we stayed in one place for the week, a beautiful resort in Puerto Vallarta with a handy kitchette. Travelling to Europe with a child and an infant would be a bit more of a challenge.

To maximize the cost of a flight to Scotland, we decided to stay longer and do more travelling. The three day family reunion turned into a month-long tour of Scotland, England and France. The timing fit perfectly with my husband's job, where they shut down for the month of July, and the weather would be great too. So we mapped out a trip starting in Scotland, driving down to England (with a visit to family who lived near London) and then a cheap flight to Nice in the south of France, driving north to Paris and flying home from there.

We got new travel backpacks to make our load easier to manage and added a baby car seat, child car seat and stroller to our mix. At that time, all we needed to do was add the children's name to my passport for travelling. Given that my son was just a few weeks old, we didn't even have a birth certificate yet. However, the passport office accepted a notarized letter from the local clerk's office that verified his birth. Whew! We were ready!

Our itinerary - a week in Scotland staying at a flat on the sea, a weekend at the family reunion, a week driving through England, a few days in London and the chance to visit relatives, a flight to Nice and then a drive up through Provence to Paris, finally a stay in a flat in Paris for a few days.

Summary - 28 days, three flights, two rental cars, lots of relatives.

Ages - turned 3 in London and six weeks old.

Highlights - beautiful Scotland, meeting 100+ relatives from all over the world at the reunion, hiking and boating in the Lake district, passing over my baby for cuddles at the command of the tourist office ladies in Stratford, visiting with my relatives in their beautiful garden outside London, the wonderful markets and countryside of Provence, tasting way too much wine in Beauce, discovering the compact and cute rooms offered by Ibis, leaning out the apartment window in Paris and seeing the Moulin Rouge just up the street.