The Emirates flight from Christchurch lasted around 30 something hours.
Here we find a new use for the Seniors Gold Card, cutting cheese during a stopover snack at Sydney Airport.
Lucky with our seat companions on the plane – first on Sydney leg was a lawn mower salesman from Brisbane – well they were John Deere rideons, the RR of mowers. He just happened to be a cyclist too and had his bike on the plane.
From Sydney we had a Child Behaviour Therapist, German born and trained who married an Aussie and was on one of her frequent trips home visiting family. We had nice chats with her and I was on my best behaviour!
Getting through the Glasgow entry system was a bit congested to start with as we were in the “EU” passport queue and then were checked in by a dour officer who actually stamped our Passports the old fashioned way. From there we just walked out with the remains of our smelly cheese, dropped it in a bin and out the door.
Managed to assemble bikes into rideable condition within one and a half hours, then onto the railway station a couple of k's away.
In between getting off the train at Gourlock and onto the ferry for Dunoon, we met an interesting couple. The man looked about my age, but turned out he had been in the Royal Navy in Singapore during WW2, so was a least 13 or 14 years older than me.
He and his brother were attending a annual memorial event, in Dunoon, to remember the lives lost off the coast of Arran in 1943, when a new submarine on it's sea trials dissapeared with out trace with the loss of over 30 lives, one of whom was their elder brother. They were the last surviving family members of crew. The story is on this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vandal_(P64)
They were a lively pair and said their pilgrimage was not a gloomy one, they sank a range of single malts and enjoyed the company of a good crowd. Soon we were onto the main topic of conversation, the UK elections the day before, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) had decimated the Scotland Labour Party and were taking 59 members to Whitehall – up from 7!!
A warm welcome at Val's cousin Ian's in their 1875 stone cottage looking out over the Firth of Clyde. The weather has been very cold and we are rugged up with all our woolies.
After a couple of nights getting over our trip, we made contact with Warm Showers people in Glasgow (Warm Showers is an International Hosting community for cycle tourists and we have hosted many of them in Picton since 2008 when we found out about it).
Gregory and Lilless, our hosts. He is French and she a Scot, avid cyclists, promoting the many benefits of cycling, but new to Warm Showers, we were their first guests. They own a second floor “tenement house” on the South Side of the city, where we shared a lovely meal, met Lilless's mother, who just happened to be an artist, with a small but successful gallery in the border area 38 miles SW of Edinburgh, and got good advice on what to see and how to get there on our bikes around the city.
Greg is Managing Director of a “not for profit” organisation that takes unwanted bikes, renovates them and offers them at reasonable price to the public, employs seven or eight people, repairing bikes, tutoring new riders, teaching bike maintenance skills and reaching out to the business world with a program to encourage employees to ride bikes to work, with dual benefits for individuals, the business and the environment.
We rode on “Sauchiehall Street” (famous to me from a Peter Sellars LP I once owned “Songs for Swinging Sellars” think it was called, with lots of Goonish humour) visited galleries with lots of interactive activities for kids, (and really informative for us older kids as well). Got to learn the architect and designer “Charles Rennie Mackintosh” who left his imprint on the city in many ways, from commercial buildings, town houses, furniture and fittings – quite a wee laddie.
Meanwhile here we are enjoying the Scottish weather.
We meet up with an old school friend of Val's on her yacht in Holy Loch today, then tomorrow start the real "cycle tour", but with great memories of our "Glasgow Experience".
