I just got back to Wichita after graduation in TX. It feels pretty good to be done! Now I have some free time to really start processing through all 19,807 images from the TREK…
Also, for graduation my family gave me a trip to New Zealand and I’m really excited to go. I am going to start planning the trip over Christmas and hopefully will go sometime this Spring. I will be uploading a few bits and pieces of both stills and video over the next few days, so keep an eye out!
For now, I have this panorama that came from the Highlands on the western part of Scotland. Enjoy! 
I am sitting at Starbucks in London’s airport getting ready to get on a flight back to the United States. It’s pretty wild how fast the whole trip has gone! We have been tremendously blessed and I’m overwhelmed with thankfulness for the trip as a while. God has been good and has blessed us extraordinarily and we are thankful for all your prayers.
We have just left Scotland where we have been for the past 6 days. We started in Edinburgh where we slept a stone’s throw from Edinburgh Castle and only a block away from the Royal Mile. We spent time photographing St. Giles Cathedral, where John Knox preached which was pretty cool.
It was cold, wet and windy. Just as we expected. A pretty stark contrast from the Arabian Desert that we had been in just hours before we arrived in Edinburgh. We spent a couple of days wondering around Edinburgh and trying to figure out how to get out to the Isle of Skye. We had bumped into a geologist in Kathmandu that was from the UK and he highly recommended we go there. So we were trying to find a 3-day tour that fit within our schedule and enable us to get out there. Unfortunately, many of the tours required booking 48 hours early or were already full.
So we decided to rent a car and just drive up there on ourselves, attempting to hit many of the same sites our tour would have. But walking home one night we went by a tour office and stopped in just to ask if they might have open tours and sure enough they did! Boy we were glad! It turned out awesome.
We started our tour the Saturday morning at 9AM and it lasted until Monday evening. We drove up through the Scottish Highlands where we saw countless lochs, including Loch Ness, tons of castles and breath-taking scenery.
Unfortunately our first two days were nothing but cloudy skies, cold winds and freezing rain. Pretty miserable conditions and not to great for photography but we managed to get some images I am pretty happy with. At one point our guide stopped the bus near a trail up to a waterfall. When we got out, it the skies looked as if we wouldn’t have any precipitation for awhile but just 5 minutes into our hike up to the waterfall we started getting pelted with freezing rain/little ice pellets. It was crazy but actually pretty fun! We have fun putting our gear to the test.
The rock structures and geology here was just fascinating. Our guide Karen, who was a tremendously wonderful tour guide, talked about how unique the geology on the island is for quite some time.
At the end of our second day, which was spent completely driving around the isle of Skye (about 50 mi long by 25 mi wide) we went up to a viewpoint that looked over a bit of the isle. The wind was blowing about 65MPH and our temperature gauge read 38°F. It was raining and sleeting but we the shot was just so great! So we got out of the bus, fighting the wind to even walk, and went up on this cliff to make a panorama. We couldn’t set anything down because it would be blown right off the cliff, including my camera or tripod. In fact, I wore my pack just to give me some extra weight.
I wish we had a picture of Dad and I standing there on the cliff, working in these extreme conditions. Dad was literally hanging on the tripod with all his weight, trying to keep it in place while I managed to get the camera mounted and began shooting a few images to make our panorama.
I was actually really enjoying it cause I could see the landscape was absolutely fantastic I knew we were getting a sweet shot and just when I thought Dad was about to look up and say he was cold and wet and wanted to go back to the bus I heard him yell something over the roar of the wind but couldn’t make it out. He said it again, “THIS IS AWESOME!!!” Haha. Just what I was thinking too.
You would never know it from the images but here’s a couple that we shot in the midst of that little adventure:
Then we headed down to the coast where we saw an amazing waterfall that goes straight into the ocean and a few stunning cliffs above the water. Again it was quite windy and wet down there but not nearly as bad as it had been up at the summit.
The next day we had a beautiful sunny day with clear skies. A great day for the long drive back to Edinburgh but we wished that we had that weather during the day we spent on the Isle. We went down to a little bay before leaving the island and caught a few views of the isle (we could actually see further than 1/8th mile, much better than the day before!
We didn’t see tons of castles when we were on the Isle of Skye but we did see quite a few in the Highlands in between Edinburgh and the Isle. My favorites were the one that Monty Python was filmed in, and another that the movie Highlander was shot in (Eilean Donan Castle.)
I have a ton more images but haven’t looked through all of them yet. I realize I haven’t posted up any images from Zambia or Dubai but I we have just been so busy I haven’t been able to make time for it. I will get some up when we return to the US with a good internet connection.
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