What a month… May has been another crazy busy and stressful month. I had a friend come visit York, which was fantastic! And then I succumbed to several weeks of stress and anxiety as I renewed my UK visa. Then I took off at the end of the month for a roadtrip to Scotland, where I didn’t have wifi or phone signal for most of it – it was the best!! Here’s what all I got up to this May.
Where I’ve Been
York, Goathland, Whitby, Castleton, London, Croydon, Appleby-in-Westmoreland, Gretna Green, Glen Affric, Drumnadrochit, Portree, Quirang, Old Man of Storr, Camasunary Bay, Elgol, Loch Coruisk, Talisker (Carbost), Fairy Pools, Coral Beach, Dunvegan, Neist Point, Trumpan, Eilean Donan Castle, Oban, Kilchurn Castle (United Kingdom)
Best Moments
Finally visiting the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Nothing else this month will compare to it. It is simply one of the most stunning and other-worldly beautiful places I have ever been. I’ve been wanting to go for years, and it was like a dream come true. We were blessed with nice weather on the three days we needed it the most. I saw so many amazing sights and enjoyed camping so much. It was just fantastic. Skye, I will be back.
My friend came to York! Nate (although I call him Kolya) lives in Bulgaria teaching English, and is one of my best friends from college. He came to visit for a long weekend at the beginning of May. I had so much fun showing him around York and sharing my city with him! He had never been to the UK before and we had a blast. We went out to the North York Moors to explore Goathland and Whitby for the day as well! One of the hardest things about living abroad is constantly missing people. So I love getting to see my friends, even if it’s far too short!
A fantastic event with Salomon in the Peak District! I signed up on a whim to an event hosted by Salomon in the Peak District, and was super surprised to find out that I got a place! It was a group of about 25 outdoors ladies and we tried out the new Salomon shoes and backpack on a walk up Hollin’s Cross. It was so much fun—not just to meet a lot of great people, but just a really fun event! I was super impressed with the shoes and loved catching an amazing sunset. Not a bad way to spend a Wednesday night!
Walking the Quirang on Skye. So many things from my trip to Scotland were fantastic. But one of my top moments was the walk along the Quirang! The scenery was amazing and felt like I was on a different planet. The only place I’ve felt that so strongly was Iceland! The walk was gorgeous and there was something new around every corner. Don’t miss it on a trip to Skye!
A ferry trip to Loch Coruisk. I wanted to get close to the Cullins (the massive, moody, mountain range in the southern part of Skye), and I also wanted to check out Loch Coruisk. I booked a ferry trip to get out to the lake and it was amazing! The ferry ride was great but Loch Coruisk was a real stunner. The water was so gorgeous and the clouds cleared so we had amazing views of the mountains. It felt like a dream.
Staying in the bothy on Camasunary Bay. I’d never stayed in a bothy before this trip! A bothy is a small building or cottage in a remote (generally mountainous) region of the UK, which is available for anyone to use for shelter free of charge. The bothy in Camasunary Bay was about a 1.5 hour walk (one-way) from where we parked the car. And it was a glorious place to stay for the night. There was a group of guys camping in tents, but besides them we had the entire bay (and the entire bothy) to ourselves. It was such a unique experience and definitely one for the bucket list!
So many other parts about my trip to Scotland. I don’t feel like I can list out all the other amazing moments of the trip here. But getting to see Loch Ness, so many castles I’ve only seen in photos, getting drunk our first night camping with some random Polish people, the beauty of Coral Beach at sunset… it was just an amazing trip. I can’t wait to go back.
Worst Moments
Applying to renew my visa. By far, this month of May has been dominated by my visa renewal. Not only was it (of course) extremely expensive—about £2500 total costs—but the entire process was so stressful. (My first visa was also very expensive, if you remember.) I spent all my days off for three weeks running around town getting the right paperwork, getting bank statements stamped, getting letters from employers that state all the right things, making sure I have all the documents to tick the right boxes, scanning hundreds of pages of said documents, and then of course having to go all the way to London (Croydon) for an appointment to submit all my documents…and the stress hanging over me that “if I don’t do this right, I can’t live with my husband.” It’s one of the worst things about living in England. It was horrible, and I don’t wish it on anyone.
The week before I applied and submitted my documents, I actually got really physically sick from the stress of it all. I couldn’t eat much, I felt so nauseous and like I was going to pass out constantly, I couldn’t focus on anything at work, I just felt so ill. My application has been submitted now though, which is good. I should hear back in 8 weeks—so it’s just the waiting game now. Please keep those fingers crossed for me!
And a reminder—I can only live with Adam in the UK because he makes a certain amount of money. If he didn’t earn over that threshold, we wouldn’t be able to live together. Even though we’re married. Even though we love each other and want to be together every day of our lives. Getting to live with the person you love is a privilege, not a right—and that’s something the UK government reminds me of every single day of my life here.
My trains were cancelled on my visa appointment day. As if the trip to London for my visa appointment couldn’t be more stressful, LNER cancelled both of my trains there and back!! I ended up being on time getting to London, as luckily I was so early I could hop on a slightly earlier train that got me in at basically the same time. But on the way back, I was delayed leaving London for 2.5 HOURS. I was due to leave at 9:00pm, and we didn’t start to leave until 11:30pm. I didn’t get back until about 2:00am and had to call in sick to work the next day, I was so sick and exhausted. Normally it would have been annoying, but it was so late and after such a stressful day—I just wanted to go home and go to sleep!
Our trip to Scotland got off to a rough start. We got a flat tire about half-way through our drive up north of Glasgow, where we had booked a hotel for that night. Our car doesn’t have a spare (something I’ve found out is now very common with newer cars), only a kind of foam to inflate the tire—which didn’t exactly help us as we had a giant hole in the actual tire! We called our breakdown company who then took 3.5 hours to get a tow truck to us, and then towed us half-way to our hotel and left us at a service station in Gretna Green. Why they couldn’t just send someone out with a tire to fix it so we could drive ourselves north is beyond me.
You can actually read about the whole ordeal in the York Press as Adam got the story published! Our breakdown company literally left us and our undriveable car in the middle of a service station, and were so rude and horrible to us—backtracking on everything they had said for hours! In the end, it did get sorted, and they have offered to reimburse us for the cost of the hotel booking (that we obviously missed due to their incompetence) and the cost of our new tire. While we were waiting for the first 3.5 hours, we got invited into someone’s house for a cuppa, and they let us play with their dogs, so there was that as well.
I’ve been working a lot. I worked back to back weekends this May in order to get the time off when my friend was here, and the last weekend to go to Scotland. And every day that I had off, I spent trying to either get free legal help for my visa application, get paperwork for my visa application, or go to London to submit by documents for my visa application. It was a lot with not enough time off for me!
There were a lot of people on Skye. I knew that the Isle of Skye was going to be super popular. But I wasn’t quite prepared for just how popular it would be. The sheer struggle of finding a place to park (even in places that you’d think were just the middle of nowhere!!) was overwhelming. So many people, so many cars. I know Instagram has helped Skye’s popularity skyrocket. But it also meant it was a struggle to get away from everyone. And this is going in May, which is still technically shoulder season! I dread to think what it’s like in July or August. Yikes.
Posts Published
My visa application took priority in May over literally everything else—so I barely published anything. Here are the posts I did publish!
Why I Love to Travel Solo – Even Though I’m Married
Instagram Top 3
I barely posted on Instagram this month, again applying to renew my visa was my top priority. Here are my top 3 photos from May!
Coming Up in June
The next week and a half will be pretty quiet as I’m busy working. But the rest of June will be super exciting, as MY PARENTS are coming to visit!!! They’ll be here for about two and a half weeks, and I’ve been lucky to get loads of time off work to spend with them. They’ll be in York and around Yorkshire for the first part, spending a few days in Scotland on their own, and then I’ll meet them in the Lake District for a weekend before another few days around Yorkshire before they head home. I haven’t seen my parents in a year and a half, and this will be the first time they’ve visited England since I moved over 2.5 years ago. I’m SO excited!
What did you get up to in May? Any exciting plans for next month?!
[…] relief was unreal. I talked about the stress of applying to renew my visa in my May recap. I’ll be writing a huge post on the process as well (as there’s literally no information […]