Happy New Year!

Hello again, everyone!

We have a few other exciting things to show you about our tours around Glasgow in early January.


First, a video taken inside the massive Glasgow Cathedral. This is a beautiful cathedral, and while we were there the organist was rehearsing. A real treat!

Our fantastic tutor at The College of Piping, William Morrison. He's a wonderful teacher of bagpipes and music, and we've had a great time learning from him. Here's a wee video of Willie playing The Dark Island, a tune we know and love (it's now on our short list of pipe tunes to learn to play, of course!).

We're going to miss Willie dearly, and we're already looking forward to seeing him again at the end of January when we come back to Glasgow for a few days before heading to Spain.


And here we are at our Glasgow apartment, playing our practice chanters for all our friends back at home. We wish you a wonderful and happy new year! (Yes, we realize we're a month into the new year already, but better late than never, right?)

Of course, it wasn't quite THAT easy... it was about fifteen takes before we got it right! :-)

And even after all that, we still only got it mostly right... The Advil Highlanders Pipe Band is taking shape!
 :-)

The RaNdoM Video Blog

Hi, everyone! We realize it's been a LONG time since we've posted anything, and we'll try to catch up the blog a bit. We've been quite busy, you see, with finishing up our time in Glasgow and then going to Ireland.


Anyway, we've collected a few videos along our way through Scotland, and we've never yet gotten around to sharing them. Well, here you go!

This one needs no description...  :-)

Here's a neat video showing a wool loom in action. This was on the northern Hebridean island of Lewis, at a black-house village. This fellow is a life-long weaver, and the fabric he's producing here will be sold and eventually made into a garment bearing the Genuine Harris Tweed label. We chatted with him for quite some time about life on the island, and life as a weaver.

Here's a clip from the death-defying boat ride to Jura for the music festival in September. The water was WILD! At first it was fun, but after a while were seriously concerned for our safety ("Have faith," we told ourselves, "the guy at the helm is a professional!") We were sore by the end of the ride, having been tossed about so, and we were really glad to be back on land again!

At that same music festival... bagpipers in front of the distillery following the church service on Sunday morning. What is there to NOT love about this? Bagpipes + distillery + Sunday church service.

At the same festival we saw a ton of fantastic bands. We couldn't capture all of them, of course, but here's a wee sample of one of them. The Gaelic singing was truly captivating!

On our way from Edinburgh to Glasgow we passed through Falkirk, which has the worlds largest operating Water Wheel. This device is used to transfer boats between canals at different elevations. It's far faster than the traditional lock system, and consumes very little energy. Here's a time-lapse showing the wheel going through one cycle.

We'll probably come across more videos when we go through our massive collection of digital memorabilia, and we'll be sure to send them along.

In the meanwhile, have fun!