Ava’s (A)musings
Ava Stoller moved to Colorado in 2007, with her military family, and calls Falcon her hometown. She is a senior at CU Boulder; majoring in communication and leadership studies. Ava enjoys reading, music and binge watching TV shows and movies — of course, never in procrastination of school work! Ava is taking over for her dad, Mark, for the summer.
The Scotland Saga
By Ava Stoller
These last three months have been filled with travel, new experiences and revelations.
Our last big adventure of the summer was a family trip to Scotland for my mom’s band, the Pikes Peak Highlanders, to compete in the World Bagpipe Championship (aka the Worlds).
The trip was just as challenging as it was exciting. It’s never a good thing when your originating flight is two hours delayed and the connecting flight gets canceled. Rather auspicious beginnings. However, when we arrived in London, we were immediately met with new travel plans.
My mom and younger sister were ticketed for a later flight that day but the rest of the family was rescheduled for a different flight the next day! Determined to get to Glasgow that night, the airline got us train tickets to Edinburgh — we just needed to get ourselves to King’s Cross station for the train to Edinburgh and then another train to Glasgow. (Part of our journey took us back to my local train station from my study abroad!) The train went the scenic route, through the English countryside and took six hours to reach Glasgow.
Throughout the following days we visited a small coastal town in the highlands, walked through castles of old, and saw astounding Scottish art and architecture. There was not a day when we walked fewer than 10,000 steps, and everything was on an incline or had five flights of stairs. Stairs are my mortal enemy and I have never had to go up so many at one time — it was horrible.
During our first weekend, the band competed in their first Scottish competition held in the highlands town of Abernethy. It was the epitome of a small town festival where highland dancing, sporting and athletic events were front and center.
The Pikes Peak Highlanders wowed the judges, the audience and took first place in the band competition. They are the first international band to win in the games’ history!
Unfortunately, the band did not win at the European Championships in Perth the next day. This greatly intensified the practice, tuning and efforts for the World competition the next weekend.
That second week was completely filled with band competition practice in the morning and traveling around Glasgow and Edinburgh in the afternoon — no rest for the weary!
I was tasked with videoing the band during practices, at each competition, and live streaming at the Worlds. My extensive experience at Celtic festivals made me the perfect person to elbow my way to the front of the crowd to take the videos. Our band advanced to the finals in their category! No trophy awarded, but the band was incredibly proud to have competed competitively in Scotland!
Throughout our adventures in Scotland, one thing stood out to me. Traveling as a family was much harder than it used to be. My sisters and I have all traveled independently and all have different styles of how we do things.
I would describe my personal style as: squirrel. There usually is an end goal in mind, like a dinner reservation or a certain museum to see, but I get easily distracted along the way and take my time getting there. This approach is quite the opposite from my sisters admittedly intense and structured plans.
The other snag was too many events planned for a short trip, little to no down time, and overall communication that suffered from everyone being exhausted.
Undoubtedly, I loved Scotland, the experiences I shared with my family, and the band’s successes!
Thank you for letting me share my summer with you, and have a happy start to the holiday season!
