Auctions, hiking and volcanic ash skies......

Auctions, hiking and volcanic ash skies...........that's what I've been up too!

Taken on my hike Tuesday at Glen Dye

So it's been a busy week. Tuesday I took a fantastic 2 1/2 hour hike with a group of girls from AWA. We stopped off at this little cottage and had our packed lunches and toasted spring with some champagne. It was a great time. It was a little windy and chilly up where we were but all in all.........a beautiful day. I snapped a few pictures while we were out hiking. The area we hiked had a lot of sheep on it and they weren't scared of us at all. They just sat there and stared at us as we walked by. Some of them were literally less than 50 feet away. But as one of my hiking buddies said, "I've never dodged so much sheep crap in my whole life". lol

See how close the sheep were and there were some that were even closer

Little creek we walked across. See all the little white specks in the background.......sheep!

Same little creek, where it flows into the river

We were kind of put in the mountains some. There was still a little snow in a few places

Wednesday we had our long awaited charity auction for the AWA group. Each year the group has an auction where members bring in odds and ends of things they want to donate and we group them with similar things and auction off the "lots" to raise money for our selected charity for that year. We had a great turn out and lots of goodies. There were some great bidding wars and everything auctioned off. We did a great job of raising 2600 Pounds for the charity. And to put that in dollars it's about the equivalent of $4000. So a great turn out for a great cause! This year our charity was Grampians Women's Aid (which help women & children coming from domestic abuse homes). We had been planning and working hard at getting things ready for the auction for a few weeks now, so it was nice to finally have the auction and see that the hard work "paid off". Yay to the fantastic group of ladies of AWA for donating things and then buying things in the auction to go toward a good cause.

And today we woke to find out that it was cloudy and overcast outside. But not due to bad weather, but rather volcanic ashes that were floating in the area above Scotland from a volcano in Iceland. It's wrecked havoc on a lot of European countries because it's got the airports shut down due to visibility and danger of malfunction by flying in the ash. Thankfully we aren't flying anywhere right now but it's really quite scary to think that it might take several days for it to clear off well enough for planes to get back to flying over Europe.

We hiked along side a river for a little while too

So an exciting and busy week here at the Bartulla household!