Home today after a night away in Stirling (and back on my laptop for this post, so hopefully the photos might not look so squashed together!). When looking through my prompts I landed on: ‘Write about the best trip you’ve ever taken’ and I decided to put a spin on this. I’ve been lucky enough to travel abroad to some spectacular places, and maybe I will still do a post about one of those holidays, but some of my favourite trips are ones that have become a bit of a tradition – small places not too far from home which have become favourite haunts. Stirling is a city my husband and I have visited a number of times over the years and we have a favourite B&B and a couple of favourite restaurants we go to now. We enjoy dropping in on the lovely indie bookshop/cafe the Book Nook., and on this trip we discovered a new shop, called Made in Stirling which was filled with amazing art products from local artists.

Another tradition is to drop in to Tir na NOg on the way home, which I call my ‘happy place’. I took some photos (above) but they don’t do it justice. I love the little shops here bursting with magical trinkets; candles, crystals, cute ornaments, gorgeous jewellery, cards and so on. The courtyard is always lit up which looks particularly nice in the darker, autumn months. Today it was looking quite festive, with colourful lights. The Soup Dragon cafe serves amazing food. We had too big a breakfast for lunch today, but I managed one of their very tasty brownies. As I was sitting in the courtyard I began to daydream about how great it would be to open a bookshop/cafe that captured the spirit of both The Book Nook, and Tir na NOg…. if anyone with any business sense wants to get in touch…

The best thing about the trip this weekend was we didn’t book it until the last minute and the spontaneity added to the fun.

Here’s to the next little trip….