Destination weddings are wonderful and a bit tough at the same time.  You travel far to see two people you care about getting married, but you are also only one of many and can’t expect too much one-on-one time with the bride and groom.  Luckily, when you are attending the wedding of two really amazing people, the company they keep is just as amazing and wonderful! It also helped that Martha and Gavin had picked a location for their wedding that I had always wanted to visit.

Since we were backpacking in Africa after the wedding for almost 2 months, packing for the festivities was a big struggle for us. It made sense for Jon to rent a kilt for the wedding instead of dragging a suit around Africa. Jon had gone ahead and reserved a kilt for that weekend from a shop in Glasgow through an online website, but it then occurred to us that we would be going straight to the airport after the wedding and had no clue how we would return it.

Luckily, I thought to ask Martha’s sister Libby (she was the key organizer on the Glasgow end of things) if there was any way she or her husband Dave could drop it off for us. It turned out that Dave had rented his kilt from the same spot. Not only did they offer to drop it off, but they offered to pick it up too.  This was the second favour Libby had done for us. She had already been instrumental in helping me to organize a pair of shoes to wear to the wedding via the groom’s mother, Birgitte. One month into life in Africa, I am very happy to not be dragging fancy shoes around. 

Another challenge we faced was accommodations. By the time we could commit to attending the wedding there was nothing left in Luss, the beautiful little village on Loch Lomond where the wedding was taking place, that would not make a major dent in our trip budget. The closest place we could book was a B&B called the Norwood Guest House in Balloch, about 20 minutes away. I had thought there were Ubers around, but that was not the case. The taxis were very expensive for our budget (about $40 Canadian each way), and there were night-before-cocktails on Friday and the actual wedding on Saturday to attend.

Thankfully, we discovered that the bus to Luss departed just meters from our guest house and stopped directly in front of the Arms Hotel, where everything was taking place! We were the only passengers on it and the driver was really lovely to chat with. The whole trip cost us about $4 for both of us. Even better, at the cocktail reception, we met two other girls also staying in Balloch and a taxi driver had given them his private phone number, so it solved our issue of having to pre-arrange late-night taxi rides during the weekend.

I should note that our B&B The Norwood Guesthouse was wonderful and we are so happy we stayed there. The owners were a guy from the area and his Romanian wife. They had met while working in the cruise industry and worked on the Queen Elizabeth II and her sister ships. They even made stops in St. John’s, NL. They were so generous that when I mentioned I was trying to find a way to visit the Gow family ancestral farm about 30 minutes away, they offered to drive us there on our last morning since they were closing for Christmas that day. In the end, we found another way there, but the offer itself was above and beyond.

On the morning of the wedding, we were still not sure how Jon would figure out his kilt and where we would get ready. We were hoping to leave Balloch in the morning and see Luss during the daytime before the wedding started. This predicament was solved when Gavin’s good friend Chris (but everyone calls him Murphy) and his girlfriend Kayleigh texted us to see if we wanted to go out for lunch. We had met the couple briefly during the summer when they visited Martha and Gavin during Trinity Fest Weekend. I am not sure what we did to deserve it, but Murphy and Kayleigh bent over backwards to make the day of the wedding an amazing one for us.

We drove to the northern part of Loch Lomond for lunch at the Drovers Inn, established in 1705, one of a number of places claiming to be Scotland’s oldest pubs. Their website even openly promotes the fact that it is one of the most haunted hotels in Britain! I have never seen so many taxidermied animals in my life. After lunch, they took us to a waterfall, picked up Jon’s kilt from Dave and Libby and took us back to their cottage in Luss. Kayleigh and I did our makeup upstairs while Murphy and his family walked Jon through putting on his kilt in the living room.  

At 4pm we all walked to The Arms Hotel where everyone gathered for a pre-ceremony drink and we took our seats. They had chosen a humanist to perform their ceremony and it was by far the funniest (in a great way) wedding ceremony we had attended.  Instead of having the couple focus on making promises for the future, the ceremony was more focused on sharing with the audience the story of how Martha and Gavin met and their journey until that point and how they felt about each other.

Next was a fantastic buffet and some short, but great speeches by both Martha and Gavin’s family members. They had managed to pull all the best parts of a wedding together without the stuffiness or too many formalities. Gavin was particularly proud of the post-dinner cheese spread, and rightfully so.

A live band set up in the adjacent room and we danced our hearts out, or so we thought. Eventually, the band pulled out the bagpipes and we were taught how to do a number of traditional Ceilidh dances.  It felt very much like a Newfoundland square dance and was a fun way to break the ice with some of the guests we had not yet had a chance to speak to.  The evening ended with us standing in a circle as Martha and Gavin danced their last dance of the night to the song The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond. 

Visiting The Gow Family Farm

The morning after the wedding was our last in Scotland. Murphy and Kayleigh weren’t done being tour guides extraordinaire and picked us up for a drive to Blairour where my father had told me our ancestral farm was located. Three generations of Gows lived there, between 1717 and 1821, a little over 100 years. Alexander was the last Gow Laird of Blairour. His son, James, (mentioned in my last blog post) emigrated to Canada and eventually settled in Guelph, and then Windsor, Ontario.

Murphy asked if I had an actual plan for when we got to the farm. We had not contacted anyone about a visit, so we figured we would be met with a smile or a shotgun. We got the smile and the gentleman who answered the door, John Craig, was genuinely happy to meet us and we had a pleasant chat on the doorstep. We never got to explore much since we had to catch our flight, so we thanked him for his time and headed for the airport.  Our next stop was Amsterdam to introduce Jon to some of my Dutch family.