Pictures from this part of the trip can be found in the Glasgow gallery.
On Friday, Ken took the day off, and Julie worked. Ken had been planning to get done various chores like mowing the lawn, but it was pouring rain all day. So, instead, he got a haircut and made an unexpected run to the doctor's office.
Julie got home around 5:00pm. We made a quick dinner, then cleaned up and headed to the airport around 7:15pm, in plenty of time for our 10:00pm flight. Ken dropped Julie off and then drove to the employee lot and took the shuttle back, which burned around a half hour.
The flight over the pond was uneventful, as was the transfer in Amsterdam. We had enough time to get a relaxed lunch before catching our connection to Glasgow. In Glasgow, we made a quick stop for cash at the airport ATM, then caught a bus to downtown. There, we walked to the Glasgow Queen Street Station. Oddly, the first bike we saw in the train station was Ken's bike, an American-brand Surly Long Haul Trucker, Brooks leather saddle and all.
We bought tickets to Milngavie, where Julie's Aunt Morag lives. The train ride was about 30 minutes. Once arriving in Milngavie, we walked about 5 minutes to Morag's new apartment. We stayed the next 4 nights at the guest room in Morag's apartment building, which was perfect: 2 twin beds, a shower, sink, and a hotpot were everything we needed.
Morag made us dinner and we sat around and chatted until around 9:30pm, by which time we couldn't keep our eyes open any more.
Both of us managed to sleep the night through, and we were more-or-less on Glasgow time by the next morning. We showered, put on some slippers, and went upstairs to spend the day with Aunt Morag. Morag is not getting around as well as she used to, so we mostly just stayed around the apartment and chatted. In the middle of the afternoon, we ran to the nearby Tesco grocery store to get a few things to have with dinner. It was nice to have a slow day to recover from the long flight.
While walking through the Milngavie city center, we realized that Milngavie is the starting point for a famous walking trail, the West Highland Way, a 96-mile hiking trail that runs north to Ft. William in the Scottish Highlands. Every time we were in the town center, day or night, we saw hikers.
On Monday, we got up and had breakfast with Morag around 9:00am. After breakfast, we took the train back to downtown Glasgow. In the morning, we walked around downtown, including a visit to the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art. We also visited George Square, which contains a lot of statues of famous people, most of them covered in bird poop. For lunch, we got some sandwiches at a shop near George Square.
After lunch, we walked to the area of the Glasgow Cathedral. First, we walked around the large necropolis on the hill above the cathedral, almost a city in its own right. After the necropolis, we took a look through the cathedral itself.
Next, we intended to take a tour of the Glasgow School of Art, but they recently had a fire and the normal tour wasn't running. Instead, we walked to the Tenement House Museum, which was really interesting. The museum itself is one apartment in a 4-floor apartment building. It's preserved more-or-less like it looked in the early 1900s, including original furniture and other effects as well as gas lighting. Ken was fascinated to see that gas lighting of this sort has a mantle not unlike a Coleman lantern.
After leaving Tenement House, we headed down toward the River Clyde to figure out where the rental car place was, so we would know where to go on Wednesday. We asked the person at the desk where the nearest train station was, and they pointed us toward the wrong one, so we spent 20 minutes walking back to Glasgow Central. (Fortunately, we later learned that Anderston Station was just a few minutes away.)
Back in Milngavie, Morag was finishing up a fantastic cottage pie that she served us for dinner. After dinner, we sat around, sipped wine, and played Phase 10 all night.
On Tuesday, we met Morag for breakfast a little earlier than usual, because she had to be out of her apartment for a doctor's appointment a little after 9:00am. After breakfast, we took the train a few stops down toward Glasgow and walked about 20 minutes to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
We spent the next few hours there, timing our visit so we'd still be in the museum to hear an organ recital at 1:00pm. (The Kelvingrove is somewhat like the Field Museum in Chicago, in that it was originally built for an exposition. That's part of the reason it has such a large and impressive pipe organ.) We looked over part of the museum, then got a decent lunch at the museum cafe, a pattern we would repeat at a lot of museums over the next few weeks. After lunch, we finished up the rest of the museum while listening to the organ.
After the organ recital finished, we walked 15 minutes or so over to the Riverside Museum of Transport and Travel. Our first stop was the tall ship Glenlee, one of only a few surviving Clyde-built ships. We enjoyed looking through the chart room and especially liked a 16mm movie from 1929 documenting the passage of a similar ship around Cape Horn. (At one point, the narrator casually points out that two of the people in the picture later got washed overboard and were never seen again.)
The transport museum itself was interesting and had a lot of content, but wasn't our favorite museum. There are a lot of cars, buses, trains, motorcycles, etc., but many of them are stacked vertically along the tall walls and it's not easy to look at them. From what we've read since, this is a common complaint. People seem to prefer the old museum, which this one replaced just a few years ago.
Once we finished up at the museum, we walked 15 minutes back to the train station and met Morag for one last night of dinner, cards, and conversation.