recently a friend sent me a whole bunch of photos of his vacation. it was one of those photo-sharing things, where you can just view all the photos. i think one time somebody suggested that i do that with my photos; it’d be so much easier.
however, quite frankly, his photos were crap.
i can say that because i know he doesn’t read this website unless i specifically ask him to take a look at something.
for one thing, it was all his photos, every single one of them, no editing at all. most of them were photos of them eating – a photo of him and his daughter at a restaurant eating, a photo of his sister and her boyfriend at the restaurant eating, various combinations thereof. just close-ups of their frozen smiling faces, over and over again, not even any pictures of food they ate – ok, there was one fabulous ice cream dessert, bu that’s all.
there were a few pictures of the place they were vacationing, but these were too few and far between. they were in nice, by the way. also, i wanted to say, where is this? what’s going on here? but no explanations accompanied any photos, like i said, it was just this huge file dumped into the computer.
and PLUS, and this is the worst of all, some of the photos were SIDEWAYS. i bet with those photo-sharing things you can flip the pictures, but he hadn’t done that, so in order to see the picture i had to turn the laptop on its side.
i’m sure his mom loved the photos.
ok, so i still have way too many pictures to print out and i’m only up to 400 and something. i decided i’d better start adjusting the ones i’ve selected because otherwise who knows when i’d actually start posting them. i do remember that when i posted our bike trip to austria it took months for me to get through them all, and there were fewer pictures then, i think. this time, though, i’m going to be MORE DILIGENT! YES I AM. all caps strictly for my own benefit, to gird my loins and hunker down and be a fast and efficient photo-poster. no sideways pictures here!
we were gone for a very long time, as i think i’ve mentioned. we left on july 8th from springfield. our flight to scotland didn’t leave till the 9th but all the trains to chicago were booked up by the time i tried to get tickets. i did so much pre-arranging of every minute thing, but it didn’t occur to me that the train from spfld to chicago would be sold out. so we left on the 8th and spent the night with my aunt sandy.
i took a picture of the empty train track in spfld, impatiently waiting for the train. it was actually on time but it seemed to take forever for the train to get there. i already posted that photo, if you recall.
the train ride was nice and relaxing after all the last-minute rushing around. we got to chicago and that night we had the BEST PIZZA I’VE EVER EATEN. it was this place called LOU MALNATI’S and i suggest you hunt it down and go there the next time you’re in chicago. actually, you can look up their website online and have it shipped to you anywhere in the US! plus there are many locations in chicago. i think we’re going to be going up there in september and i’m very excited about going to LOU MALNATI’S PIZZA.
our plane didn’t leave till thursday evening, so we took a long and lovely walk. we walked all the way to lake michigan, stopping at loyola university which is quite nice. just north of there is a little beach and we took our shoes off and walked in the sand. this is the only warm, sand-walking day of our vacation. it didn’t fell like our REAL vacation since it was just Chicago, but it was a great way to start things out. relaxing and mellow.
i wish i’d taken a photo of that delicious LOU MALNATI’S pizza; i’d print out a big photo and put it up on the wall. probably not a good dieting encourager, though, huh?
our flight was on Aer Lingus and it was fine except horrible because neither of us could get comfortable and sleep. oh, to have the money to travel business class where you can stretch out. we were sitting right in the front of the main cabin, nobody in front of us, but for some reason the space was just too small and uncomfortable. it was cool because they had individual screens for each person and lots of good movie choices that you could pick and choose for yourself. i watched “18 again” which was surprisingly good. kevin watched “monsters vs aliens” and then, when i was trying to sleep, he watched “benjamin button” which i kept watching but not hearing and it looked depressing and slow-moving but he said it was good with the sound.
after pretty much no sleep at all (and have i ever mentioned that i need eight hours at a minimum?) we touched down in dublin and had to hustle to get our connecting flight to glasgow. because we were in a hurry we got to bypass the really long customs line and we just shoved our passports at the guy in the booth and that was that. no big deal.
the flight to glasgow was only about an hour, also no big deal, and in scotland we just walked out of the airport, no need to show any passports or anything. they’re very low-key about security in scotland, as far as i could tell.
we got on a bus to our hotel and were there quickly and it was warm and lovely and sunny and our hotel, the kelvingrove, was right next to the lovely kelvingrove park. we left our bags at the front desk and staggered outside.
we made it over to the park since it was only about 5 minutes away and went into the kelvingrove art museum. this wasn’t on the list of things i really wanted to see in glasgow, but it was close and we just wanted some lunch.
they’re re-done the museum recently and it was really very nice. plus lunch was delicious, except there were way too many small children all over the place.
here’s the museum.
after eating we looked around in the gift shop and weren’t even going to look around the museu, but i saw a photo of the huge pipe organ upstairs so we decided we’d better go look at it. the main hall was very cool. kevin didn’t take a picture of the organ for some reason. i took lots of video, though, and maybe someday (not very likely) i’ll put together some kind of video of the trip. maybe if i do another “gracetalk.” also kind of unlikely because of my general laziness and lack of motivation.
anyway, here’s the main hall.
here’s me on one of the many bridges in the park. it really was a great, beautiful space. also nice that it wasn’t raining and cold, as we had expected it’d be.
we were able to check into our hotel and promptly slept for two hours. yeah yeah yeah you’re supposed to stay awake all day in order to overcome the jet lag but we seriously needed sleep. it was nice. the bed was soft and comfortable.
we decided to go to a street called Ashton Lane, also not far from the hotel. it sounded like an interesting and fun street filled with galleries, shops and restaurants. it turned out to be a very very short little street with a few restaurants and i didn’t see anything but restaurants and a movie theater, but maybe i missed the boutiques and stuff since i was so tired. we found a good place to eat called the loft and we could sit up on a balcony outside and watch the people below.
here’s one of quite a few photos that kevin took that i don’t know exactly why he took them. why a picture of me studying the menu? i just can’t say.
we got somebody to take our picture. i wonder what the movie ad behind us was for; it looks like mohammad ali, doesn’t it? below us, we had our first guy in a kilt sighting; this was a young guy in a kilt and a shirt and tie. he was probably going to a wedding; we were told that young men wear kilts for special occasions a lot now, and this was the first of many we saw. kevin didn’t take a picture, but i captured it on video. imagine it in your mind. he had red hair in a ponytail and a shiny grey tie.
i know i complained about photos of smiling people at tables, but we had to record this, my first MAGNER’S CIDER. i’m sure you can get it in springfield, as a matter of fact i need to remember to go to a liquor store to find out, but this is the first time i had it and it was delicious. even better was PEAR CIDER, which i found later on. pear cider was harder to find in scotland, and in the UK we couldn’t find it at all and i wonder if they have it here?
since it was the very first day of our trip, i got something super-healthy to eat, i think it was a veggie sandwich and a salad, and kevin had a latte instead of any alcohol. of course, as the trip progressed we got lots of alcohol and fried food. kevin mostly ate fish and chips and i wish i’d taken a picture of him eating the fish and chips and we could have a wall just devoted to that. oh well, next time.
even though we were ready to go to sleep, instead we walked a little distance to the glasgow botanical garden. the guidebooks said it wasn’t nearly as grand or impressive as the royal botanic garden in edinburgh, but actually this one seemed nicer. it was also helpful that it was a lovely night, as opposed to the very rainy day at the edinburgh botanic garden later in the trip.
here i’m studying a tree. i’m sure there was some very important fact written on it, but i guess i’ll never know what that might be.
and here’s kevin; he mostly had the camera so most of the pictures are of me.
this is the glass house, which was closed, but the outside was cool.
it was a small but very nice garden. crowds of people were pouring into the garden when we got there because they were doing a shakespeare play, i can’t remember which one. we decided not to attend since besides having to get into the shakespearean dialogue while being so sleepy, it would be done with a scottish accent and probably impossible to understand. we did watch a little bit of it because it was outside, and the performance didn’t look so great.
we were very happy to get back to the hotel. even though it was about 9:30 or so it was still bright light outside. because scotland is so far north, it stayed light till about 10 or 10:30 every night.
here’s our room, which was quite nice but you can’t really tell so much from this photo. our room was below street level.
this is the view of the pretty garden outside.
we stayed at the kelvingrove one more night after we were done biking, and they put us in a much bigger and better room. when the woman was showing me to the room the second time, we chatted about trip advisor and how i’d found the hotel there, and she showed me one room and it was fine, but then she said “if you’d like a bigger room, we have this one.” she then showed me a GREAT room and obviously it was because i’d mentioned trip advisor. i think a big reason why they are the number 2 rated hotel on trip advisor is because they really work at getting people to write about it – there was a computer on the wall in the lobby and an announcement that if you wrote a review of the hotel you would be in a drawing for a free stay, and they drew a different name every month.
it was also a reasonable, nice, clean place, with a delicious breakfast.
and that’s our first day in glasgow, mostly feeling beyond tired. we slept for 10 hours and spent saturday morning exploring glasgow, then took the train to our first cycling town.
more later. it’s time for a friday afternoon cocktail.
ok then,
grace.