Pining for the Fjords

As most of you probably know by now, I have strong ties to Scotland.  The city I grew up in, Dunedin, Florida, was founded by relocated Scots, and our bands in middle and high school marched with bagpipers and played Scottish music.  One of the coolest things in moving from middle to high school was getting to actually wear a kilt while performing in the band, and every four years, the band would take a trip to visit Scotland, staying in our sister city of Stirling, aka "The Gateway to the Highlands."  I grew up around highland games and in every city I've lived in so far, I've sought them out.  Thankfully, Chris likes bagpipes as well, so he's always been happy to accompany me on these journeys to seek out my fellow Highlanders. One of the highland games in this area every year is on the Queen Mary, right in Long Beach Harbor, 15 minutes from our house.  Perfect!  Although we couldn't attend the games themselves this year, due to an impromptu weekend tri...

A few weeks ago, on the morning of Super Bowl Sunday, I had the opportunity to run the Surf City Half Marathon, located in nearby Huntington Beach (about 20-30 minutes away from us). Branding, yo. I didn't initially have Surf City on my race calendar, but it participates in what it calls the Beach Cities Challenge; essentially, if you run the Long Beach Marathon (or half), Surf City, and the OC event, all in consecutive order in a given year's time span, you get an extra special medal for your efforts.  As my constant readers know, I ran Long Beach  in October 2016 and since I was already signed up for the OC full coming up this May, I figured adding the Surf City half to my calendar would be fun; I'd earn the extra fancy medal (if I finish, of course - I never take that for granted anymore), and I'd pre-burn some calories sure to be completely eclipsed by whatever I'd eat and drink while watching the Super Bowl that night.   When I signed up for the ra...

After the bedtime excitement mentioned in Part 3  of the story, Chris and I slept well and woke up the next day at Mom's house, ready to hang out more in the Tampa area.  Chris and Lily made up after their fracas of the previous night, so everyone was friends again: I'm pretty sure Chris is holding his breath here. We puttered around Mom's house for a bit and then headed to the northern end of Pinellas County to visit with my good friend Sarah and her family, who were also at their Mom's house for the holidays.  Since the traffic patterns there are never a certainty, we ended up a bit on the early side, and we cruised through downtown Palm Harbor past several houses where we used to live, checking out the old stomping grounds.  Eventually, it wasn't too painfully early to go see Sarah and the crew.  We so enjoyed visiting with Sarah, her soon to be hubby Kevin, her Mom Maureen (Mo!), sisters Heather and Alicia, niece Rachel, and the newest addition ...

As you may recall, in Part 2  of our Christmastime story, Chris and I celebrated Christmas Day with the whole "fam damily" (as we like to say) and had eaten way too much food. The 26th (Boxing Day!) started with the two of us rolling out of bed at a decent hour, cleaning and packing up, and checking out of the Sheraton.  Seriously, if you need a hotel in Northern Orlando, check it out; it was a great place.  We weren't quite sure what everyone was doing for breakfast, but given all of the heavy (but delicious!) food we'd been eating the past few days, we felt something lighter and healthier was in order.  We hopped onto Yelp to find a local spot on the way to Granddad's house and located a cafe called First Watch that seemed to fit the bill.  As it turns out, it is an eastern chain, but at least it started in Florida, so I suppose there's that.  We were seated right away, and had fun looking out the window while waiting for our food to arrive: Just...