It’s about that time where we’re settling into the new routine of life in a different house. We arrived here on the 30th August, but we didn’t take over the house ourselves until the 2nd, so that’s right on 10 days of settling in.

Two Dogs and 4 Cats

We’re looking after 2 Scottish Terriers (one comes with the house, and we’re babysitting the other one) and four cats. Two of the cats can’t stand each other, which can become problematic. Maud, the Scottish Terrier that belongs to the house, has skin issues so we have to bath her every other day, give her medication and ear drops.  What’s crazy is that  6 animals feels a bit easier than the one large dog in Belgium! Maud and Tosh (our temporary charge) are easy to take with us on day trips, they’re friendly and compliant so it means we can get out and about and not worry so much.

Feeding time on the other hand is a bit crazy. Four cats crawling over you and two dogs wanting their share too! Come 5pm they are all going a bit nuts.

We’ve managed to grocery shop for a whole week!

Weird thing to be excited by, but we still hadn’t got into the habit of weekly shopping when we were in Belgium. But this past week we only went to the supermarket once! Do you know the last time we did that? Auckland — so that’s back in April and possibly even late March.

So what do I think of Scotland?

Love it! It’s gorgeous, it sure helps that we have a fantastic view. But even when we were in Edinburgh for a few days where it was complete chaos with people, I really loved it.

• We’ve had tons of people just chatting to us randomly, which has been a big and welcome change.
• We’ve discovered some very nice Scotch!
• I’ve seen some fantastic old stuff! Gotta love the old stuff.
• The kids are so happy to have a very tolerant cat! (Smigel gets wrapped up like a baby, gets dressed in outfits, dragged around and played with constantly!)
• It’s really nice to be able to read food labels!
• Having the use of a car is again really liberating, but is also awesome to be driving on the left again.
• So many great little small towns we’re close too. I love this kind of travelling who knew that Dingwall or Cromarty were great places, and that we want to go spend time in Tain.

What’s interesting is that we’ve spoken to a few people who’ve said that they’d would move to New Zealand and live there if they were 20 years younger. Haven’t quite got a clear reason why though.  (Doesn’t seem to be to do with Brexit though).

So hopefully we’ll be able to blog a bit more over the next couple of weeks before we start this routine all over again. We still haven’t figured out where we’ll be in October and November. I’m leaning towards Aberdeen for next month, but it depends on if we can either find a housesit (that really has to be at least a month long) or a reasonably priced rental… When I mean reasonably priced, something under NZD$2500 per month! Our REAL budget is NZD$1250 a month, but in Scotland there doesn’t seem to be anything in that range anywhere. (Something that’s close to public transport, has internet and fits all of us are our criteria.) So we’ll see what happens there.

Oh and yeah, spending my birthday in Scotland… very happy about that! The plan is to go to the local pub the Culbokie Inn for dinner.

* The word ‘Tattoo’ means “last call”, the song they play to close the bar and send troops back to the barracks.