Scotland 2019: A week in a fairytale
Updated: May 23
Charlotte and I graduated from our respective universities in 2019. Charlotte graduated from the College of William & Mary a week before I graduated from Elon University, and then a month later we were in Scotland for her graduation from the University of Saint Andrews!
Taadaa!
First line of business when we arrived was all the boring stuff (but is it still boring if you're in Scotland??). We left the airport and picked up our rental car, some of us took a nap. As soon as we arrived, Charlotte was already bumping into friends on the street.
Dad caught us all off guard with a dinner photo at BlackHorn where we went to refuel on some epic burgers, so we'll leave that photo kinda small. And then we went and moved into our little AirBnb!
We did some exploring to reacquaint ourselves with the layout (more for everyone's benefit except Charlotte. She's our resident tour guide.)
Her Joint Degree Program had a reception for all of its very own graduating students. Families were invited, obviously. We even got little name tags so people would know I was not Charlotte, helpful!
THE BIG DAY! Charlotte's graduation happened at the very beginning of the week:
The official who read her name pronounced it "Shuh-Lut" and we'll never let her live it down. How do you mispronounce Charlotte but nail the "Engel"?
Here we all are being SO proud :)
We stepped outside to the grass to take photos and congratulate everyone else. Charlotte ran around to find all her friends, we saw some official men carrying the school maces (ancient and very fancy, we got a brief history lesson from them about their origins), and then were whisked away to the Garden Party.
I attended two garden parties that week, hence the different clothes in these photos, but I figured I don't need to write about them twice. In the below photo we're reading the story printed on my scarf about a bird. You had to have a ticket to enter and they served champagne (there was a lot of that all week) and snack foods in the form of tea sandwiches and tiny desserts.
As if we weren't already full of tea-food and champagne, our next stop was the Old Course Hotel where we sat down for a celebratory dinner!
Good food and even better company!
And because it's Scotland in summer, and the sun doesn't set until you've finished absolutely everything on your list, we went home, changed into something warm, and finished our evening on a hilltop overlooking the North Sea.
