Jerry's birthday - Falkirk Wheel

I thought you might be interested in the birthday trip I organised for Jerry just earlier in the month (May). We went to Edinburgh for the day to see the Falkirk Wheel!!!!!

For those of you who do not know, Falkirk is a town between Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. The ‘Wheel’ is a feat of rather magnificent engineering whilst being intriguing to watch due to its shaping and impressive movement. The ‘Falkirk Wheel’ is a tourist attraction and working construction. Its purpose is to enable water traffic to move from Forth & Clyde Canal to the Union Canal and vice versa. The wheel has replaced 11 locks, so what took all day to do now takes 15mins in one turn of the wheel using the same power required to boil five kettles of water.

The idea to go and visit the Falkirk Wheel came from the channel 4 programme with Prunella Scales and her husband Timothy West narrow boating around British canals. As painful at times it was to watch a doddery couple give scripted commentary on a narrow boat, seeing the bit about the wheel was interesting to us all. Jerry and Kevin (my dad) were ‘dribbling’ with interest – so it became the ideal gift in doing something for Jerry's birthday, thereby avoiding getting more stuff. I became clever in my uncluttered mind to think outside of my box and came up with the brain wave of “we can do this in a day!”

We went with Ryanair from Stanstead leaving the camp site at 5.30am and returned just before 10pm, it was a fabulous day of experiences for all six of us as mum and dad (Kevin and Sandra) were part of the party too. This was Dylan’s first air flight and he was a ‘squirming worm’ of fidgeting hands and feet through the flight, a very excited 5 year old, with a taxi ride and boat ride to follow in the day. Milo really enjoyed the flight as he downloaded a GPS onto his phone and we got a running commentary throughout both flights of the speed, altitude and the cities we were going over, this added to the interest for us all. You might ask who the ones who got security searched were – it was the oldies, with bags emptied and drug swabbed. Dylan and I walked through and our lanky teenager wrapped in his parker coat did not bat an eyelid. This happened to the oldies both flight’s!!!!

We got to Falkirk by taxi and after perusing the wheel mechanics, along with cups of tea, cake and play area it was our turn to go on the wheel by stepping onto the boat. And what a surreal phenomenon - to be lifted out of the water, to be placed back in the water 35 meters above, to then gently sail down the canal into the tunnel, under the Roman antonine wall, to then turn around and do again.

The cost of the whole trip for all six of us (being return flights, taxi fares, boat ride and lunch) was £400, the flight was £35 return each.

It was such a successful day we came away saying where can we fly to again for a day??

Next trip planned is to Dublin later end of June for £60 return.

Milo recorded the majority of the trip going to Falkirk and has edited his film to music, it is just under 2mins long so take a look to get a tastier of our trip.

If you can not get the video to work on the blog then cut and paste the link below into your search engine.  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq888f_T8_0