The Buckingham Blog

Sorry for not getting this on sooner. What with me trying to sort out pictures and a spell of illness over the past couple of days I'm just not as efficient as everyone else at getting these entries on the blog.

Anyway, excuses aside, better tell you all about my (our) birthday weekend to Aviemore last week. Like Julie said my birthday surprise from her and my parents was a relaxing weekend in the Hilton hotel. We headed off on Saturday morning, the car packed like we were going for a fortnight rather than one night,  around 10.

The drive wasn't bad actually and the kids behaved the whole way. We got there about 12:30 but as check-in wasn't till 15:00 we decided to do a bit of a driving around first to see what had changed in the 15+ yrs since I was last there (not a lot!) and try and get our bearings.
 

We found this nice little Italian just down the road from the hotel. Stupidly, and I have no idea what we were thinking, we decided to have the "all you can eat" buffet they had on. It was really nice actually, all the food was homemade and was being replaced with new stuff every few minutes - Yes Krystal does eat that much!! :-)

After rolling out all full-up we headed to the hotel. It's really grown since I last saw it and the place is now full of things for the kids to do. Kory had a field day the moment we got out the car.

After checking in we headed up to the room. The hotel had laid out a nice little surprise for me as well in the form of chocolates, shortbread, sparkling wine and balloons. Woo hoo!!!

The kids loved the surprise as well :-) 

We never really got time to have a drink as we headed straight down to the swimming pool to let the kids have a splash around. Krystal has never been to a pool so this was her first time and, being so long, Kory was a wee bit rusty as well. Both were in tears pretty much the moment we got in but it didn't take them that long to get used to it. A few milestones for Kory as well - he managed to doggy paddle for the first time with his arm bands and a float and got to try his first jacuzzi.

Time went past really quickly and by 18:00 we were in for dinner. Still bloated from the Italian the 3 course meal was nice but oh it was too much!!! I was still feeling the affects at 08:00 the next morning :-(.

We called it a night after that as Krystal was getting grumpy!!

Kory on the other hand saw this as an opportunity to party and was still going strong at 22:00. Well I say strong, this was him at 22:00 but his head hit the pillow like a lead balloon 10 minutes later :-)

 
Generally it was a good night sleep as well which was an another nice surprise.

The weather wasn't great the next morning but with an 11 o'clock checkout the time soon flew by. We went down for an early breakfast which basically had everything under the sun going ( and me still stuffed from the ngiht before - bulk!!). The kids stuffed themselves silly and Julie stuffed her face like she wasn't going to be eating breakfast for another week. It was yum though :-)

The hotel gave us one more present which was a complimentary pass for the kids to go into their fun house. So after we were all checked out we headed there. They both had a great time, unlike the ones in Aberdeen though, the adults aren't allow on with them (boo!!) so we had to sit and watch them from afar.

"The party man" Kory didn't last as long as he usually does and was knackered after about an hour. So cue our time to get in the car and head home.

Both of them slept pretty much the whole way so I think we can safely say that a good time was had by all.

And so ends my 30th birthday celebration. Well almost, my 33-inch Transformer just turned up today  - woo hoo!!! My parents birthday present to me. I'll get some photos of that on soon :-).

Finally, thanks everyone for all your presents and the effort you all made for my birthday. It's really appreciated! If you heard the problems they all had organising all this lot they'll be glad to see the back of this milestone.

 Anyway here's some more photos from the weekend. Talk soon.

 James