June 23, Monday

Today was pretty much a wasted travel day.  We caught the ferry from Islay over to the mainland at noon, and spent the remainder of the afternoon driving to Glasgow.  Before we left the island, we had about two hours to kill, so we stopped at the Ardbeg Distillery cafe and had tea and fresh scones.

This next photo pretty much sums up our entire day.

One thrilling thing:  just a few blocks from our apartment in Glasgow, we drove by a blue Police call box … one of only 8 left in the world.

Before we left Georgia, Adam did some magic mumbo-jumbo to our computers so that when we got to the UK, Netflix would think we were still in the United States and wouldn’t refuse to let us access our account.  The television programming here is pretty bad, so Isabella has been watching Doctor Who most evenings for the past month on her computer.  It’s her new favorite show and she’s obsessed.  Anyway, spotting the blue Tardis-like call box this afternoon put a new spring in her step.  We got into our apartment too late to go do anything tonight, but our first order of business tomorrow morning is to walk over and get a photo with the call box.  It looks slightly different than the Tardis call box, though.

We learned that there are only 8 surviving Police call boxes left, and “Crich Tramway village has the only known surviving Mk2 Metropolitan Police Box in the world. Unlike the other boxes around the country it is neither a replica nor a Glasgow-type box. The Scottish boxes, whilst almost identical to the casual observers have different panels to the Doctor Who type.”

Crich Tramway village is in England near Nottingham, so we’re putting that on the bucket list itinerary and will try to get over there for a picture before the end of our trip.  It’s nice to have goals.

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The apartment we’re in is gorgeous, with high ceilings and a Victorian feel.  The guy who owns it is an antiques dealer and he has appointed the place with all kinds of beautiful treasures.  It looks like a professional decorator has been in here.

It has one major drawback though … there are full-length mirrors everywhere.  Every wardrobe has them, and the bathroom is almost entirely mirrored from floor to ceiling.  The tub/shower enclosure is especially bad, with mirrors on all three sides and very unflattering lighting from one sickly yellow fixture high up on the wall.  While bathing, one is subjected to views of one’s own anatomy that one has no business seeing — and those views go on for infinity.  There is no looking away!  Every bulge, dimple, crease, discoloration and flabby jiggle is revealed.  Christie Brinkley would look like a gargoyle in this bathroom.  Regular people —  like me —  look like the bloated corpses they’re always finding on episodes of CSI.

I took a bath and came out clean in body but foul in mood.  I kept waiting for the mirrors to fog over, but they didn’t.  The one time a fogged-up mirror would be nice, and it doesn’t happen.  I stalked out of the bathroom in a towel and said to Adam, “We’re getting fat.  We have to be more careful about what we’re eating.”

He looked up from his computer, blinked a couple of times, and said, “Excuse me … WE?”

Humph.  It’s hard to eat sensibly when everyone else is getting treats so I was hoping that by saying “we” I’d get a health partner, but Adam refuses to get sucked into my self-loathing spiral.  “Do whatever you want, but don’t drag me into it.  I think you look fine.”

I spent extra time this evening angrily working out with my resistance bands.

June 24, Tuesday

Adam gets up at the crack of dawn, which in Scotland in June is roughly 4:30 a.m.  By the time everyone else wakes up around 7:00, he’s already completed his work, gotten bored, and is champing at the bit to go outside and do something.

This morning it’s raining and we only have one umbrella, so we left Isabella in charge of the kids and went for a walk to orient ourselves in Gasgow and to get Adam out of the apartment before he went nuts.  Nothing was open at 7:30 a.m. but we did get a chance to peer in shop windows and make mental notes on places to visit later in the day.

The Starbucks was open.  We haven’t seen a Starbucks in weeks.  Last summer on our tour through the United States, the second half of the trip started to feel a little monotonous because every town looks pretty much the same.  The physical locations have some character, but mostly you wake up in a Holiday Inn, drive for 8 hours, and go to bed in an identical Holiday Inn 500 miles down the road.  You eat the same dinner at Chili’s that you had in an identical Chili’s the night before, and spend the next day driving down an identical interstate.  Everything has become homogenized.  It’s not all bad; it provides consistency.  You know that every town will have recognizable stores, and you’ll know exactly where to go to get whatever you need.  Character is lost; convenience is gained.

That homogenization has not happened in the UK.  In the United Kingdom, they’ve done a really good job of keeping out the big box stores and chain businesses.  You can still find them, but they are much fewer and farther between.  It maintains regional character and makes each little town interesting and unique.  The downside is that getting rooms and meals is kind of hit-and-miss … some places are charming and fantastic, and others are disappointing.  Finding services can be difficult.  I guess it’s a trade-off.

Anyway, we haven’t seen a Starbucks in weeks, which made finding one here feel exciting.  Adam stocked up on coffee and I bought a Glasgow mug.

Back in the apartment, I started thinking about how we’ve been living out of suitcases for a month and haven’t really felt deprived of anything.

I am a real homebody of a person and love my house … everything in it is exactly the way I want it.  The things I miss about it when we’re on the road are things like knowing exactly where everything is, our own bed, the ability to precisely control the water temperature (surprisingly hard in the houses we’ve been staying in), my reliable washer and dryer, and our pets.  I don’t really miss anything else, even though I love all my “treasures” — family heirlooms, kids’ artwork, paintings and other artwork we’ve collected on our trips, the furniture made by Adam’s dad.  I’d be emotionally devastated if they were lost, but I don’t need those things to be comfortable.

The things I’ve found that truly make daily life more enjoyable and end up buying for myself on almost every extended trip are my own tea mug, good-quality loose tea, and my own bar of Dove soap.  Adam ends up buying a French press, a big coffee mug, and good-quality coffee.  It’s really amazing how just those few luxury items can improve a day and provide a sense of structure and comfort.

The other thing we’d have a hard time living without is high-speed internet access.  Adam needs it for his work, and the rest of us need it for our sanity.  It keeps us connected to the world and entertained.  It’s a revolutionary game-changer, in a truly miraculous way, that people very quickly have started taking for granted.  Nothing else in history has given more people more freedom.

But enough with the Deep Thoughts … on with the day!

Our first stop once we got the kids collected and headed out:

This above photo is now Isabella’s wallpaper on her phone, and she’s emailed it to her friends.

 

Riverside Museum is a fantastic place to take kids.  The museum focuses mostly on forms of transportation — buggies, carts, automobiles, boats, bicycles, trains, subway cars, trollies.  The descriptions on each display are aimed at 5th graders, which is the exact right amount of information for me seeing as I’m not particularly interested in transportation much beyond, “Will it get me where I need to go?”

They also, to my delight, focus on the more interesting aspects of travel through the ages, such as the clothes people had to wear while driving the first cars in order to keep bug splatter off their faces, and how Glasgow had the worst tuberculosis outbreak in all of Europe so spitting on the trains was subject to a £150 fine.

The museum is not terribly big, as far as museums go, and kid-friendly so we were able to let the kids wander off on their own.  There were several school field trips being conducted, so our kids wandering around fit right in.  They were thrilled not to be stuck with us, and Adam and I were thrilled that we got to enjoy the museum without having to keep one eye on them at all times.

Nothing is done halfway here.  These are actual taxidermied horses on their replica of a 1900s Glasgow street.

Authentic cars and shops with goods of the period.

The car collection wall.  This photo makes them look like models, but they were the real thing.  You can see a man at the very bottom for scale.  My dad would still be in this museum if he’d been with us.

Outside and for no apparent reason:  misters.

After the museum, we wanted to walk a loop around down by the River Clyde on the way back into the city center.  It turned out to be a much longer walk than we expected, but still having fun!

Then it started to be less fun.  Still walking.  Isabella and Holden both developed blisters and we were still miles from where we needed to be.  There isn’t much along this path for tourists.  It’s mostly high-rise office buildings and conference centers.  We were starving by this point but didn’t see any restaurants.  We finally found a tunnel bridge back across the river and into the city center.

View of part of the University of Glasgow.

We finally found a place to eat lunch that wasn’t a pub.  It was Thai Siam — as the name suggests, they served Thai food.  The restaurant is very modest-looking and smells strongly of jasmine.

To our surprise and delight, we were treated to an absolutely spectacular lunch, which the kids unanimously declared the single best meal we’ve had on the entire trip.  The lady who runs it kept coming over with extra food and a wave of her hand; “Oh, this is included in your meal.”  The kids were stuffed with every food Thai children love best, and capped the meal off with bananas rolled in shredded coconut and black sesame seeds, then deep fried and served with ice cream.  We had to promise them we’d eat there again tomorrow.  No pictures, but if you’re ever in Glasgow, Thai Siam is a good place to grab a meal.

We had extra food left over from lunch, so we went back to the apartment for a little while to drop it off in the fridge and have a bit of rest.  Isabella and Holden put band-aids on their blisters.  Once we were ready to go again, we headed out for the Kelvingrove Art Museum and Gallery, which is very close to where we’re staying.

Impressive entrance, with the huge pipe organ.  They play the organ each day at 1:00 p.m., but we missed it.

This museum had lots of hands-on displays for kids.  This one was all about how to make a mummy.  Wrapping one is harder than it looks.

They have a fantastic natural history section with lots of animals.  Adam and the kids had to pry me out of this section.  I learned lots of new things; for example, male duck-billed platypuses have venom-filled spikes on their back legs with strong enough poison to kill a dog.  Some shrews have a venomous bite.  I didn’t know there were any venomous mammals at all, and it turns out there are several.  Also, the Kiwi bird has the largest egg-to-body size ratio (1:5) among all birds.  Look at this:  (I got this x-ray photo off the internet.)

Something cool here … they had a display about ospreys and how they are trying to repopulate them in Scotland.  The photo of the bird on the display was of the exact osprey we saw at Loch of the Lowes in the scientific research station through the telescopes on June 12th.

Interactive map of Glasgow.

South American jungle display.  I still have a whole collection of scarlet macaw feathers from when we bred parrots back in 1994-2000.

Then we enter the painting/art section and the kids suddenly get bored.

This is a painting of the cabin in which the Scottish poet Robert Burns was born.  The cottage has since been turned into a museum and we’re hoping to visit it on our way to England in a few days.

Here is how much Holden loves art.

I loved this hall.  I had to rush through at light speed.  Everyone was tired and had achy feet and backs by this point.

On the way out of the art museum, I said, “I’m feeling so happy and full of love right now!  We’re all together, everyone is getting along and having fun … we’re living the Good Old Days right now.  When we’re old and decrepit, this is what we’ll look back on and remember.”

After making fun of me for being sappy and sentimental, Isabella and I started talking about memories.  She told me that when she was around 5 years old and about to enter Kindergarten, she overheard me remark to Adam, “Isabella is getting to an age where she’ll start retaining memories for the rest of her life.”  Isabella told me today, “I heard you say that to Daddy and I thought, ‘Cool!  I’ll need to remember this!’ and now it’s pretty much my first memory that isn’t just snippets of visual images.”  You never know what will stick in someone’s head.  I have no recollection of that incident at all, but it certainly sounds like something I’d say.

The last stop of the day was The Chocolate Factory.  The kids all got ice cream cones.

Sign on the street.  I guess this is good advice in general.  Take note, fellas.

We walked our feet off today, which felt good after several days of being pretty inactive.  On the islands, we got around mostly by car.

I think I’ll skip taking a bath tonight and save facing the bathroom of horrors for tomorrow morning.