Winter travels part 3: Christmas, Scotland (and Texas)

Following on with my recap of our winter travels (see part 1 and part 2), we went to Scotland over Christmas. This trip mostly consisted of Maëlys meeting friends and relatives for the first time.

Great Grandma Turnbull with Maëlys.

Ken, a family friend, with Maëlys.

Me, Maëlys, my cousin Kathryn, and her daughter Jess. Jess is two days younger than Maëlys!

We've been to Scotland many times before, so we didn't do any sightseeing or anything. Strangely, it was unseasonably warm for most of our visit. I think it was about 12C (52F) on Christmas day. It's usually somewhere between 2C and 8C (35F and 46F), and doesn't get into the double figures until March.

Sunrise! At 8:30am. Gotta make the most of those 7 hour days.

It was great getting to see everyone and I was strangely proud when "showing off" Maëlys to people. A little like an enthusiastic schoolchild showing off their class project, "I made this". Except better! She seemed to enjoy the attention too, and wasn't afraid to meet new people as babies sometimes are.

After Hogmanay, I left for Paris, while Talia and Maëlys remained in Scotland. After three days I was leaving for Texas, for another conference (in Austin). We had originally intended to all go to Paris together, but Talia decided to stay in Scotland with my parents rather than be in Paris alone with Maëlys, which was a sensible decision, I think. Of course, my parents were thrilled to get to spend more time with their favourite granddaughter!

I had a couple of days in Paris, which was enough time to unpack and re-pack and to digest Julien Barnes' excellent novel The Sense of an Ending. Then I was off to Austin, Texas for a linguistics conference.

I don't have any pictures for you from Texas, I'm afraid. I was travelling light so I didn't take my camera, and I was in fact travelling so light that I forgot my phone charger, so I don't even have phone camera pictures. In any case, I spent most of the time at the conference hotel, so there isn't much of interest to report. It was in fact unseasonably cold in Austin, also around 12C (52F). I understand that normally it's more like 20C (68F).

It was a good conference, with excellent scientific content and good opportunities for me to meet other academic linguists, new and old. Still, I was very happy to get home, this being the longest I'd ever been away from Maëlys. It was also good to be stationary for a while after all this travelling.

Stay tuned, one more "winter travels" post to go and we'll be all caught up!

Bonne année!

Happy New Year! Hard to believe we're only four years away from 2020 now. It's like we're living in ...THE FUTURE!

We hope you all had joyeuses fêtes and are settling into a happy and productive 2016. Rory and I enjoyed spending Christmas and the new year (or Hogmanay as the Scots call it) in Scotland. We had a relaxing time seeing friends and family, driving to Glasgow, Coatbridge, and Glenfarg to visit people, and generally eating too much good food. It was the perfect cure to my feeling cooped up and lonely in Paris.

The obligatory silly Christmas photo with the family

As a side note, when I first started traveling to the UK five years ago, I was hyperaware of all the differences between Britain and the US. Everything seemed foreign and (forgive me British friends and family) charming and quaint. As I became more familiar with the country and customs, those feelings ebbed, but I still felt very conspicuous and out of place. I would try to mimic the speech patterns of the natives, make sure not to say "pants" when I meant "trousers", all in an effort to not be the obvious and clueless American.

After five months in France however, I have come to regard Britain as my second home. I feel comfortable there, I can almost always understand what people are saying (except in Glasgow--man, those accents are thick!), and I feel that I can be myself 96% of the time. Compared to the challenges of living in a country where you're bad at the language and where the culture is significantly different from your own, being in the UK is a walk in the park. I could even see us living there some day.

Now, back to the task at hand. Our trip to Scotland was lovely and pretty standard, except for one particularly stunning day. You may have heard of (or experienced) the flooding that was happening in parts of Scotland and northern England this past month. If not, it was serious stuff. Towns were submerged when rivers flooded their banks and a considerable amount of damage was done in many places.

Dumfries, where the Turnbulls live, is in the south of Scotland, and although it sees a bit of flooding every year or so, it isn't usually too bad. This year, however, was a doozy. The Turnbulls' house was never in danger, thankfully. But when the local river burst its banks we headed downtown to see the flooding in progress. We went during the afternoon and again in the evening when the water was even deeper. Here are some photos.

The churning River Nith, breaking its banks

Not the best place to sit...

A friendly policeman helping neighbors pile sandbags at their door

Notice the change in water level between afternoon and evening...

It's just water under the bridge

No shopping tonight

Perhaps not the best place to leave the car

Fortunately, this is about as bad as it got. By the next day, the water levels had receded considerably and although things were still very soggy and many shop owners had goods damaged by the floods, no houses or cars were swept away and most people avoided any problems at all. Dumfries was lucky!

And that's all for Scotland. Next week, Rory will share more of our thrilling adventures in Paris. Have a great week!