Scotland

This past week-end, Jane and I made our final 'big trip' in the UK. We took advantage of the April 4 day weekend (Brits are big on Easter - they get both Friday and Monday) and started out early on Friday. Along for the ride was our new super cool GPS (a Garmin eTrex Legend) which we got on eBay. We're pretty happy with it - it's the cheapest mapping GPS around and we got it for 75 British Pounds (GBP) with full maps of Europe included. The drive up from Northampton is about 6 hours straight, but we were a mite leisurely so it took us 7.5 hours. On the drive we saw a high speed car chase on the M6 in Birmingham. Thankfully we were on the other side of the highway away from the sports car, 10 police cars and helicopter!

We stayed at a cheap motel outside Glasgow with train access to the city (well, there were two stations, one 1.6 miles away and the other 4 miles... we ended up walking to the latter because a. we like to walk and b. the closer station was a tiny thing without ticket services which means you don't know the schedule and you have to buy on the train).

After finding the hotel and getting our room, we immediately got back in the car and headed for Loch Lomond, which is a fairly large (by UK standards) lake about .5hrs north of Glasgow. It was pretty. We walked around a bit. But since it was pretty late, we were quick to investigate the local pub. We ended up sitting be side a youngish couple and chatted with them. Well, the guy anyways - the girl, who was Croatian, said nothing. Which was a shame because all the guy wanted to do was blather on about how Scotland would - and should - separate from Britain. He made some mostly nonsensical argument about having more members in the EU if they were their own country. Admittedly, it was a bit interesting to hear an Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) supporter say his (lengthy) piece, but Jane noticed that the guy on the other side of us - a rather older fellow - was starting to strain from the effort of not jumping in. A short while after the SNP guy left, the other guy let 'er rip and we got to hear the other (much more compelling) argument. One of the reasons this new guy was more compelling was that he had shown good sense by living in Canada (BC, to be exact) for about 30 years. Quite the coincidence! Even better, he was quite an active member of the NDP and had very passionate memories of hearing Mr. Greatest Canadian himself, Tommy Douglas, speak. He had many an interesting tale to tell. We chatted with him and his wife for must have been 2 or 3 hours.

The next day was Edinburgh day. Firstly, I should say that the weather was absolutely perfect that day, so this may contribute somewhat to my belief that Edinburgh is one of the prettiest cities I have ever seen. My first thought is that is looked rather like old Quebec City except with even higher hills and a bigger, non-hotelized castle. Now, something very important happened in Edinburgh, but first let me just say that we did most of the usual touristy things. The city is very well set up for tourists. Most of the major attractions (including the local Starbucks) can be accessed from the pretty main street which is pedestrianized and in places has a view of the ocean (North Sea). At the top of the hill is Edinburgh castle, which has at it's gates the very statue of William Wallace that inspired Braveheart. Strangely, the statue is wearing British style chainmail and looks nothing like Mel Gibson. So I guess there was some poetic license taken with the statue. There's a fair bit to do in the castle - museums and stuff. Here's an interesting bit of trivia: When the 'Honors of Scotland' (basically the Scottish Crown Jewels plus the 'Stone of Destiny' which is a very old stone that Scottish kings used to sit on) were hidden from the Germans in WWII four people were told where they were kept: King George VI, the Kings 'Remembrencer', the Secretary of State for Scotland and The Governor General of Canada. Other stuff we saw were the Walter Scott memorial, the Roman Park Hill and the New Scottish Parliament.




But here's the really important thing that happened: We discovered a restaurant that is tied for #1 on Derek's international list of Phad Thai!!! And since Satay on the Road has changed ownership and now makes crappy Phad Thai, it effectively has the title to itself. It was truly outstanding. So if you go there, find the Thai restaurant that is off of Cockburn street. You won't be dissapointed.



That night we did something a little dumb to get home. We walked from the '4 miles away' train station instead of taking a cab. The first part of the walk was fine - along a major street in a Glasgowian suburb called 'Motherwell'. The second part, however, is along a not so widely used, dark street that separates a huge park/lake and a few sortof poor-ish neighbourhoods. And what do poor-ish, somewhat drunk and angry youth gangs from Motherwell do on a Saturday night? Why they pop down to the lake to harass cars and, in the rare event that they can find them, people walking by. So they swarmed us a bit. Maybe ten of them between the ages of 12 and 15 I would say. Not good, but it could have been a lot worse. They tried the whole hoodlum 'play nice then suddenly turn on them' trick, but that only works if the mark falls for the 'playing nice' bit and tries to ingratiate himself. Which I did not. In any case, to make a long story short, they eventually gave up and contented themselves with kicking rocks at us as we walked away.

Since this is probably seeming like a novel to you at this point, it may come as some relief that Glasgow, in contrast to Edinburgh is quite unremarkable. Oh, there's a shopping district and a cathedral (which has a cool hilltop graveyard called 'the Necropolis') but thats about it. Glasgow is an industrial city, with an industrial history and doesn't have much time for tourists. It does apparently have quite an artistic community, which we did see some evidence of, but I suspect we really didn't know where to look. In any case, we went to Starbucks, visited the shopping area and the Cathedral/Necropolis, walked along the river and headed back to the Hotel for a 'Carvery' Easter dinner.


Monday was mostly about the drive home, but on the way we finally got to Hadrian's wall, which was built by the Romans in about 60AD to protect themselves from the Scotts and the Picts. I've been wanting to see the wall again since we got here. And, well, it's quite a wall. Not very tall anymore, but you can see how thick it was. And to think that it ran (still runs, really) from coast to coast.




Next up, I'm headed home for a week to attend my Grandma's memorial. No time for visits, sadly - I'm going to be on the road for 5 of the 9 days I'm there (and in the US for 3) - but when I get back here it'll be T minus one month before our big huge Europe trip and T minus two months until we're back for good!