Wednesday August 3rd we were off to Glasgow. The ride was much shorter than from London to Edinburg. An hour max. When we arrived it was significantly cooler and raining. We were able to leave our 3 bags at the train station while we met up with our friend’s daughter who is a grad student at the University of Glasgow.
Our first stop was a gluten free Indian restaurant. This made me very happy as I didn’t have an Indian food whilst in London which I have done in the past, and here was a restaurant where my daughter who has Celiac could try Indian food an not get sick! The other thing that I was looking forward to in Glasgow, was it was a bit less touristy and I had asked Steve, after talking to Grace, that if we could slow our sight seeing pace just a bit, and do more relaxing, that would be lovely. We had been averaging 6 miles of walking a day up to this point and admittedly that didn’t change much during our stay, but at least we weren’t getting up at 7 AM everyday either.
After lunch we went off to find our Airbnb. This turned out to be the most luxurious of our trip. Two bedrooms with two baths, totally remodeled. A new kitchen and living area. I told the owner I would happily live there if given the chance. They also had king size beds!! Being older this was a glorious and joyful surprise. The only issue we had with the location was getting the heat working properly.
Glasgow historically has been the blue collar town to Edinburgh’s highland reputation. We found it much more livable though as we didn’t run into crowds as much. One of the highlights while in Glasgow was a drive to Conic Hill and a hike of said hill. This was near Loch Lomond. We got in a great deal of the scenery of this little corner of Scotland. We had a lovely lunch in a nearby village at a place called “The Kitchen Window”. Our guide even ran into some friends from University. He took us to see Doune castle which was a request of ours as it was used as background in both Monty Python’s “Holy Grail” and Outlander. We did a drive by of Stirling Castle which would have been great if we had more time.
As is often the case when I go on a big trip like this, I look forward to getting back home toward the end. I think this time it was a bit different. I was truly enjoying the cooler weather in the UK. Having grown up in the Bay Area, in Marin County specifically, I was very used to cooler weather. But the last 20 or so years have been spent in the warmer East Bay and this summer has been particularly hot. (Hello 112 degrees?!? Hell on Earth.) I suppose I should have written more and sooner about Glasgow, but we really did enjoy it. It was just so much more normal. We checked out some of the buildings of the university and the Gothic arches were very Harry Potter. All the building we saw on this trip were so much more interesting because they are so much older!!! You sometimes forget what a young country the US is until you go overseas.
We did have an interesting struggle on the flight home, but I’ll leave that for another post.
Hope all are well! More later.