Thurs May 29, 2025
Hi Gang! Happy Summer! Yes, the Wandering Italian and his co-pilot Kathy are off on another adventure. This time we’re crossing the pond to visit Scotland, Ireland, England and the Netherlands. But the majority of our time will be in the various islands around Scotland or as Holland America calls this cruise, “The Wild British Isles”!
And from my reading they are all somewhat remote, off the beaten path, rainy and windy (aka Wild)! We’ll be going to places like the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, The Outer Hebrides Islands, the Isle of Man as well as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Rotterdam, Belfast, Cork and Dublin. This will be a 14 night cruise on board the Holland America Nieuw Statendam ship (the same one we were on a few months ago for our Caribbean getaway). We’ll pretty much circle the British Isles via roundtrip Dover, England. See our itinerary pic below!
We flew over on Wed 5/28 and will spend a few days with our good friends Sue and Stuart who we’ve cruised with several times. They live south of London and are nice enough to let us stay at their place and drive us to the port of Dover. Now those are good friends!
Our flight over to Heathrow went well and we spent yesterday catching up with Sue and Stuart. They took us to this cute town of Guilford which ironically was where my youngest daughter did her study abroad at the University of Surrey. Small world!
Sue is a great cook and made us an amazing British dinner called “Toad in the Hole”, which was sausages and Yorkshire Pudding with mushy peas, mashed potatoes and gravy. To get us ready for our cruise eating she also had two starters of French Onion soup and gravlax and shrimp. It was all so yummy!
We crashed and caught up on all the sleep we missed flying across the pond. Looking forward to spending another day with Sue and Stuart. Hope all are well!
PS: I’m really looking forward to listening to the Scottish brogue and learning about Scottish culture. As an example, here is a common Scottish phrase that I love!
In Scottish it is – “Lang may yer lum reek”.
In almost English it is – “long may your chimney smoke”.
In basic English it is – “May you have a long and prosperous life”!
Gotta love the Scots!
The Wandering Italian 