Three weeks!

I never posted, but we got our passports! It only took three weeks, and we're now free to leave the country :) My photo is a bit pink which bums me out - and my sister commented that I didn't smile and asked if they made me keep a straight face. I then had to explain that ages ago I watched a show about how they were asking people not to smile in their passport photos because their face recognition programs they were beginning to use could not pick up facial features through a smile.

However, I was never actually told that and now I feel like a doofus for just believing it. My passport is good for ten years (I think) and I want to be smiling now. If it didn't cost so much to get a passport (almost a hundred bucks) then I'd just buy another. I don't want the world to think I don't like to smile. I do, I do! I just watched a show ages ago and never forget stuff like that :(

Fiction or non-fiction

I was talking to my Mom last Friday night - excited and running a mile a minute about Scotland again. She asked if I was going to the stone circle out of our book and I said that we weren't going to any stone circles because most are not in our area. I also said I didn't think that the stone circle in the book, a place called Craig na Dun, was even real. However, she had me thinking. So she handed me the companion book (because the books are so large, span over so much time, and have been published over such a long period of time - there is a book dedicated to characters, places, events & such for easy reference). I've been reading the book but it has almost no maps and so I'm at a loss as to where Craig na Dun is. I know that it's supposed to be near Inverness - but when I search I find nothing.

I did find a site that said the place was fictional - and considering the book brought widespread recognition to just about everything listed in the pages - I'm inclined to believe.

It makes me a bit sad though. This series of books was it. It was the start to my fascination turned obsession of Scotland. I already had a feeling that most of it was fictional but that small amount of hope I got at seeing the author on the back of the dust cover standing beside a stone circle was really enough to make me dream of being there. To be able to think to myself, "I'm going there!"

Will this sudden realization change Scotland for me? Not in the least :)

The woes of petrol prices

Okay.

So if they sell gas by the liter in the UK, and it's currently 105.9p (I'm assuming that means pence?) per liter and there are 3.7854118 liters in each gallon then that means that each gallon of gas is going to cost 4.01GBP (or, $8.12). If the average compact car has a gas tank of about 14 gallons - and the average compact car gets 25 miles to the gallon than that means we'll get 350 miles to the tank. If we're traveling approximately 1,000 miles that means we'll have to fill up approximately three times. If each fill up costs us approximately $113.68 - than that means we'll be spending about $341.04 in gas alone.

This is all just approximations of course. This is if we don't get lost and drive in circles. This is also with mapping to the center of each postcode rather than door to door because hardly any of the locations we're visiting give complete addresses. Most are, "we're ten miles southwest of the A90" (<--- um, I don't know if there is an A90 or what is ten miles southeast, so no jokes). This is also with the current gas prices - it will more than likely rise dramatically (if it's anything like here) within the next five months.

Yikes. Oh well. We'll figure it out. We're going to SCOTLAND!!!