Traveling Ice Cream — The MacBell Clan

We love to travel and visit new places, whenever we do my obsession with ice cream is there to follow! I wanted to highlight some of the ice cream I’ve tasted while abroad in other countries. I see large differences between flavours in ice cream and overall I can taste the difference in quality of ingredients across the ice creams I’ve eaten. I can’t say ice cream abroad tastes very different, but I can say the ingredients and flavours are unique to the stores and creators. Overall, ice cream is great and I love each one I try! (With some exceptions ~ pistachio will never be a favourite)

Joe and I first went on a trip to Europe and explored Scotland. It is one of my favourite places in the world and I have visited three times now. Joe had always wanted to go and we actually have quite a bit of family history there. Our clans - Campbell and MacDonald, are very old and large Scottish clans from Northern Scotland who used to fight over land. The Battle of Glencoe highlights the history between our two family clans. We went to visit and learn more about our ancestry and while we did, I was able to find some of the best ice cream in the city. In fact Mary’s Milk Bar was one of the only places I found in the city for ice cream and you could tell it was a good place to be because there was a line in the middle of the day during the week, which is not something I’ve found many places so we had to go in and get a scoop. I chose a scoop of chocolate lavender and another of sweet cream. Lavender is an extremely faint or very floral flavour and this one was filled with floral lavender, one of the most floral I’ve ever tasted. The cream is organic and I could tell it was very heavy (a good thing) because the cream taste came out clearly in both scoops. Although this flavour had chocolate in it, I could taste lavender much more, definitely not a complaint on my part. In the photo above, the castle behind the ice cream is the Edinburgh castle. (An inspiration to JK Rowling for Hogwarts ~ for HP fans out there).

We took another trip and this time to a new place for both of us to Sydney, Australia. Our trip was during the northern hemisphere’s Winter/Spring season and the southern hemisphere’s Summer/Fall. But while we were there it was still 40 degrees celsius and felt like one of the hottest summers I’ve ever experienced. During our first few hours in Sydney we were jet lagged and tired from traveling, the sun was so hot we rested in the shadows of the Sydney Opera house because we felt like we’d faint if we didn’t. While visiting we had to visit Bondi Beach because its one of the most famous beaches in the world, and for great reason. The water was so warm, warmest ocean water I’ve ever been in. And the sunshine was burning hot, so hot we did get burnt within a few minutes of being outside. While on the way back from the beach we got ice cream at the ice cream shop on the beach (there were many here) called Gelatissimo. What’s funny is I don’t even recall the flavour of this one, I just remember it was great to eat something cold to cool me down. Looking at the photo I’d guess praline? Maybe? But who knows!

I almost forget (and I’m adding this in after the post has already gone live!) but there was an amazing flavour I had while vacationing in Ocho Rios with my mom. She booked us this beautiful vacation for a week, my first time visiting Jamaica and her second. We had a great fill on jerk chicken and our hotel was an all inclusive resort so we could eat whenever we wanted to. I will add, I gained 10lbs while we were there, not even joking. I came home and found I had eaten an extra 10lbs of weight while I was there but it was vacation and I had a blast doing it. There was an ice cream shop in the hotel, how terrible! I ate there almost daily and had only one flavour, rum raisin. Pictured above. I will never forget this one because it actually tasted just as the name assumes. It was amazing. Jamaica is known for their rum, its the smoothest I’ve ever tasted and it is so sweet, almost like juice. This added a great taste to their rum ice creams and I haven’t found one that even comes close to the quality of rum ice cream here.