Stumbling upon a python, a photo by viralbus on Flickr.

As always, it was a great experience, so much better than Eden.

If you don’t know the place, the idea is to take a zoo and a greenhouse, and then take the animals out of the zoo and put them and the visitors into the greenhouse together. This means that monkeys, parrots, leaf-cutter ants, pythons and bats might suddenly be sitting on your shoulder (the really dangerous animals, such as rattle snakes and Komodo dragons, are still locked up).

Furthermore, you can help feed the animals at specific times, and Léon loved feeding the bats just as much as Anna enjoyed feeding the manatees.

Apart from the winter months, you can fly directly from Edinburgh to Billund (home to Legoland and the Lion Park), which is about 80 miles south-west of Randers, so it’s really quite easy to get to.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the photo — it really is a live python next to Léon!

When I travelled to Denmark ten days ago with Amaia, Anna and Léon, nobody asked us any questions (Amaia, Anna and I were using our Danish passports and Léon his British one).

However, when we returned last Wednesday, Léon and I were interviewed for a couple of minutes by the border police in Stansted (our relationship, his date of birth, and who I was). They also told me it would have helped if I had brought his birth certificate.

It’s great they’re trying to do something about child abductions, but wouldn’t it be more appropriate to ask the questions when you leave the country where the child is a citizen rather than when you bring them back?

I also fail to understand what difference a birth certificate would have made. If it had been combined with our marriage certificate, I guess it would have shown a link between us, but surely unmarried stepdads and grandparents and the like are allowed to take kids on holiday, too?

The border police need to state clearly which documents they want to see to allow for smooth passage if the passports aren’t enough any more. Otherwise it becomes completely unpredictable whether you’ll be allowed to travel or not, which isn’t very satisfactory.

When I visited Denmark a few days ago (together with Léon, Anna and Amaia, but that’s another story), I wanted to take a few bottles of my home-brewed beer to inflict on old friends, so I wrapped eight bottles up in my best clothes and handed the suitcase over to Norwegian (they fly Edinburgh-Copenhagen, even during winter).

When we finally got to Århus, I unwrapped the bottles, and apart from one (which had leaked a little), they seemed to have survived the trip.

The next day I met up with an old friend of mine, Jes, who also happens to be a home-brewer, and I proudly poured him a glass of my fine brew. Or so I thought.

The beer was producing much more foam than it does here, and the taste had deteriorated. Jes was being very polite about it, but I was disappointed.

The next day I was visiting another old friend, Thomas Mailund, and I brought him a couple of bottles, too. I was hoping that the problems had perhaps been resolved by letting the bottles rest a little longer, but unfortunately it tasted even worse than the day before, not just yeasty but also sour.

So I have to conclude that my home brew doesn’t travel. If you want to taste it, you have to visit me here in Scotland!

Given that the northern half of Europe (including most of France) has had abysmal weather for the past few months, while Italy and the rest of the Mediterranean have had beautiful weather, that turned out to be an excellent decision.

We have had full sun for 99% of the past fortnight (well, of the daylight hours anyway), whereas it seems likely it would have been closer to 1% if we had stayed on this island.

It would have been lovely to have stayed for longer, but the three big ones are going to France on Saturday, and I have work to do. I just hope the weather patterns will change soon!

Min søster og hendes mand, deres datter og hans to sønner besøgte os her i weekenden for første gang nogensinde. D.v.s., de besøgte mig alle for fem år siden, da jeg stadig var single og Ursula ikke var født endnu, og de besøgte os uden Felix og Theodor for 3½ år siden, men det var altså første gang, de alle fem besøgte os alle syv.

Det var meget hyggeligt!

De var her i tre døgn, fra fredag til mandag, og vi spiste traditionel skotsk mad og gik tur ved Loch Lomond.

De fire små legede utroligt godt sammen, og Léon og Anna blev bedre og bedre til at tale dansk til Ursula. Marcel og Charlotte var vist lidt overraskede over, hvor store Felix og Theodor var blevet, og omvendt!

Vi håber, de snart kommer igen.

We’ve just returned from three weeks in Tuscany, where my parents had invited us to spend the summer holiday with them in their house in a tiny village called Pieve Pontenano in the mountains less than 100 km south-east of Florence.

The weather was quite pleasant most of the time, with temperatures around 30 degrees in the shade (the main exception being Marcel’s birthday, when it was raining heavily) – the day we flew back to Scotland, temperatures were about 20 degrees lower in Prestwick than in Pisa, so it was quite a shock to the system to return.

My parents’ internet connection isn’t great, which is partly why I haven’t blogged while I was away, but it is actually really nice to be away from everything for a while.

We went on a day-trip to Rome with the two big ones, and another to Siena with all the kids and my mum. Siena was surprisingly even more touristy and expensive than Rome, so I wouldn’t recommend going there during summer.

We also went on shorter trips to local towns such as Arezzo, Bibbiena and Montevarchi – the latter was by far the better place to buy clothes because very few tourists seem to go there (apart from David Cameron).

We all enjoyed it. Léon got much better at speaking Danish (rather than just understanding it) – when I was lying in bed in the morning I could often hear him speaking Danish to my parents with his almost pedantic pronunciation.

I wish I could say it was nice to be home, but if only their internet connection had been better and the kids hadn’t needed to start school soon, it would have been been severely tempting to stay there for another three weeks.

I’m sure that’s not the intention, but as a blog posting on Better Nation pointed out today, Scotland will probably have to join Schengen at some point post-independence, simply because England will be seen as the continuation of the UK, so Scotland will be treated as a new EU member, and they generally don’t get many opt-outs (which will also mean that Scotland will eventually need to join the Euro).

Personally I’d be delighted if Scotland joined Schengen, given that we tend to travel much more often to Schengen countries (such as Denmark, Germany, France and Italy) than to England. Who knows, it might even convince the English to join, too.

Writing this blog posting, I was a bit surprised that I couldn’t find a realistic mock-up of what Scottish passports will look post-independence, given that the layout of EU passports is heavily regulated.

It didn’t take me long to make one myself in the Gimp, though. I made the assumption that it’ll be the lion rampant that will be on the front page, although it might of course be some other emblem.

The idea was to have a quick look at Urquhart Castle during our lunch break.

However, when we got there, we realised they had built a wall and planted trees to prevent visitors from seeing the castle without paying the entrance fee of £7.20 for adults and £4.30 for children between 5 and 15. This would have meant that for all of us to get in we would have had to pay £57.40 – a hefty price to eat our sandwiches in a ruin.

Needless to say, we tried to climb the wall to take a few photos and then ate our lunch in the car park, followed by a toilet break in the next village because they wouldn’t even let you use their toilets without paying the entrance fee.

As far as I could gather, almost nobody paid to get in. I wouldn’t rule out that many tourists would pay that much during the summer holidays, but they would definitely make more money in April if they lowered the price.

Urquhart Castle – the free view
Originally uploaded by viralbus

What gets me is also that they had absolutely no rebates for families. If our kids had been closer together in age (e.g., 13, 11, 9, 7 and 5 instead of 13, 11, 5, 3 and 1), a single visit would have cost us £35.90. That kind of price just prevents families with many kids from going altogether. Will people setting the price for attractions never understand that large families typically have less money left to spend on entertainment than families with 1.4 kids? Of course it’s our own choice to have many kids, but the result is that we just don’t go to places that charge a high entrance fee for each child.

That said, it looks like you can get free admission to lots of castles including Urquhart Castle if you join Historic Scotland, which costs £79.80 per year for two adults with up to six kids. That actually is a fairly reasonable price – I just wish all the individual attractions would adopt a similar pricing scheme.

Before we embarked on our epic journey of England, we were a tiny bit concerned whether Amaia at six months was too young to cope with the travails of camping.

She loved it, however! (Except that she thought we travelled too far between campsites.)

As the photo shows, she enjoyed playing with the lantern. She also enjoyed sleeping with her mum and dad in a double sleeping bag, listening to the noises through the canvas, and being around all her siblings all the time.

She complained one night when Phyllis was taking her to bed while the rest of us was having dinner outside – she wanted to sit together with us and have a chat and a chip.

Of course it wouldn’t really work if you were too keen on sterilised bottles with formula, but for a breastfed baby who’s happy to supplement it with real, dirty food, it’s a great holiday.

Marcel, Charlotte and I left Phyllis and the wee ones on the sandy beach in Lyme Regis and walked over to the Jurassic cliffs on Manmouth Beach.

We had heard it was a good place to find ammonites, so I was hoping to find an incomplete chunk or two.

What I didn’t expect was to find the beach littered with huge, complete ammonite shells like the one on the photo!

On the other hand, we didn’t find any small ones we could take home. Whether that was because they had already been removed by other fossil hunters, or whether only the big ones fossilise well, I don’t know.

What I do know is that we met several other people with big hammers that they used to split the stones with. We had to restrict ourselves to chucking the stones onto the hard ground, which is not quite as efficient.

So next time, we’ll bring hammers, chisels and a sturdy rucksack!