A few days in Glasgow

In September Dana and I took advantage of an opportunity to spend some serious time in Scotland – something we’ve always wanted to do.  Coming at the end of a long, hot summer in Saudi Arabia, I was ready for Scottish weather, which we expected to be cold, cloudy, and wet. I was looking forward to playing in the rain!

Just to be clear, since a few people have asked me about this, yes, when we’ve taken trips we take a good one. We aren’t extravagant, but we don’t scrimp and penny-pinch either. If we see an opportunity to do something fun, interesting, or just because, we very well may do it. When we only get to see each other a few weeks a year, we’re interested in making every bit of the time count.

We met at Heathrow airport in London after overnight flights, which was nice because then we traveled together to Edinburgh airport. Dana hates to fly, but she’s been a real trooper about flying to Europe to meet up with me, and I appreciate her effort!  We arrived in Edinburgh around 2 p.m. and picked up a rental car – more detail on this coming soon – and drove to Glasgow.  Yeah, I know, we could’ve flown straight to Glasgow, but we changed our touring plans after we’d already booked the flights. It would’ve cost more to change the flights than it cost to have the car for 10 days!  

We typically stay in what are termed “vacation rentals,” and we often book through TripAdvisor. We much prefer these to hotels, as it is much homier.  We can go to a market and get food and supplies for a few days, and not have to rely on restaurants, plus we find locations with washer and dryer so we can clean our clothes and not have to bring so many! 

View from our flat

In Glasgow we stayed 3 nights in a stone building from the 1900s, with a short walk to the train station and markets, and a beautiful view (above). It was a great place to start the trip and get settled to the new time zone. We took the train to city center each day and toured around from there. We’ve never done this before, but we took the sightseeing bus, which turned out to be a very good deal. You can hop on and off as you wish at 28 locations on a 45-minute tour, and it was only £2 more for a 2-day pass. We took advantage of this and saw everything we wanted to see!

Flower train at station 

 Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city, and reminds me a bit of Montreal – a bustling, modern city center with old, quiet, pleasant outlying communities. It was green everywhere, which was lovely! We really expected it to be more into fall.  Here are a few highlights from what we saw from the Hop On Hop Off bus tour. 

The Clyde Arc – This lovely arch crosses over the road it supports, giving it a very unique, angled look, and the locals call it the Squinty Bridge.

Finnieston Crane – the River Clyde was a center of commerce and industry, and hosted a massive ship building enterprise. This huge crane is the only remaining one of 13 along the water, a stark reminder of the Clydeside shipbuilding era.

 Tunnel entrance – I know, it doesn’t look like a tunnel, but it has a twin on the other side of the River Clyde. Build in the 1800s, each holds a hydraulic lift that could raise and lower horses, wagons, and people to and from a tunnel below the water. This system operated until the 1980s! Pretty successful idea.

The Kelvingrove Museum – This magnificent structure was built of red sandstone in 1901 on the banks of the Kelvin River at Kelvingrove Park.  It was refurbished and reopened in 2006 and admission is free! We highly recommend a visit. Full of art and artifacts, exhibits range from old masters artwork to Scottish history to a Spitfire hanging from the ceiling!

Glasgow Cathedral – Scotland’s only remaining medieval cathedral, there has been a church of some kind at this site for over 1000 years, since the patron saint of Glasgow, Saint Mungo, built a church here. Construction of the existing building began in the late 12^th century and it has survived redesign and rebuilding, reformation, and war. The architecture is breathtaking! Pictures don’t do it justice, but here are a few.  We spent way too long looking at this awesome place, and almost missed the last bus of the day to get back to Central Station to take the train back to our flat. 

One note about the city is how clean it is. In the 1980s the city began a program to sandblast the decades of soot and grime from the city's many tenements and municipal buildings, revealing their magnificent Victorian stonework. This was a coal-powered town for decades, but it is gleaming now. Well done Glaswegians! 

Glasgow was a good starting point for the trip, which over the next two weeks took us to Scotland’s west coast, up the Caledonian Canal to Fort Augustus at Loch Ness, up to the most northeast point at John O’ Groats, south to Inverness, then down to Edinburgh.  More to come soon!

#Glasgow  #Scotland  #KelvingroveMuseum  #GlasgowCathedral

A rare example

Hello all, I hope this post finds you well. Many of you know that my lovely wife and I took a recent trip to Scotland, and some of you have been waiting to hear about it. Well, it was grand. I think this was one of the best trips we've ever made together, and between us we took oodles and gobs of photographs, some historical, some family-related, some just for fun and beauty. That's not really what I'm going to write about today, but it does provide a starting point for my thoughts.

Scotland has been populated for a great long time! Dana and I both have family history there going back many centuries, hers to the fellow who pretty much first controlled the Caithness - the northeastern part of the country.  A Viking from Norway by the name of Gunni, who became the founder of the Clan Gunn. More on this later. We started our trip in Glasgow and worked our way around the highlands for two weeks.

I've been working through my pictures - sorting and selecting, and processing a few - and came across the first image below that I'd forgotten (which is why I take pictures!!). Since I've been in something of a philosophical frame of mind this week, and suddenly I had this post in my head.

Every age has had its takers and givers. 500-1000 years ago it was the kings and nobles, who pretty much robbed their people of everything and worked them to death, so they could live like, well, kings! In the 19th century it was the Robber Barrons, industrialists who did pretty much the same - they controlled the materials, means of production, and transport, and lived lavish lives at the expense of the common people who worked 12-16 hour days for scraps.

Nowadays, despite 150 years of laws in America to keep this from happening again, we have the 1% who own wealth more than the rest of us combined, with record corporate profits while income for the rest of us has been stagnant for 20 years.

But every age has also had its givers - those who saw need and put that ahead of themselves.  Here is a little bit of a story about a giver. The image below is Glasgow cathedral, a Gothic structure that sits at the site where Glasgow was founded by Saint Mungo. There has been some kind of church on this site for over 1000 years, and this one, started in the 1300s, is a doozy.

It is a towering structure that just takes your breath, and we stayed so long poking around in the bowels of the place that we almost missed the last bus to take us back to the other side of town where we were staying. The main church doors are no longer used, and we entered through a side door behind the trees in this image.  Just to the left of the entry, this memorial was built out from the side of the structure. It caught my eye and I had to stop and read it.

As you may guess, it was very difficult to read even standing right in front of it, but I read it to Dana and took this picture of it. If you click on the image above to see an enlargement, you'll be able to read much of the text, but this is what it says, as closely as I can render it like the original:

Somehow this comforted me a great deal. This wealthy man, at some point in his life, decided his wealth would better serve the community of people than to serve himself. And before his death 142 years ago (at age 89, no less - well done George!) he gave back what he had acquired from the people in his community and elsewhere. He gave a lot, but it doesn't need to be a lot. We can all do a little, and sometimes a little is all that someone else needs to get them going again - a little help, a little money, a smile, some encouragement. You never know the reach of the smallest of your gifts, but it will likely be further than you ever expected.

There are still those who give massively, and that is a very encouraging thing to be aware of. Bill and Melinda Gates have given away over $25 billion to philanthropic pursuits. Likewise Warren Buffet, who has challenged his fellow billionaires to give away at least half their fortune during their lives or  before they pass away - a worthy challenge.

The author J.K. Rowling, who penned the Harry Potter stories, was dependent for many years on public assistance before she was published. Now, she has given away so much of her wealth, to give back to the system that supported her, that she has dropped out of the billionaire class, and I don't think she has a regretful thought about it.

Thanks to all you givers - a smile, an encouraging word, ten or a billion dollars or euros or pounds - you make the world a better place to be for all of us. And thank you, George Baillie, for being that rare example of self-sacrifice and benevolence. The world needs lots of that right now.

I know this isn't normally what or how I write in this blog, so thanks for humoring me as I share some deep thoughts. Next time, stories and pictures from Glasgow, Scotland!  Best, Mark

#Scotland #giving #philanthropy #Glasgow #Glasgowcathedral

A few photos from last year

Last summer Dana and I went on an 11-night cruise, and it was oh so nice! We met in London and spent a day, then went to a small port northeast of city and boarded our Celebrity cruise ship. We've been on two cruises now with Celebrity, and it would take some serious selling to get us to try another line.

With an upcoming trip this year, it occurred to me that I never posted any images from last year, and there are some very nice ones. So please indulge me as I take you on a whirlwind look, with two images from each port of call.

In London we went to Greenwich - you know, where the time starts - and saw the Royal Observatory built by Sir Isaac Newton, among other notable scientific figures. But for me the highlight was visiting the Cutty Sark, for a time the fastest clipper ship in the world. Sadly, she came along right before the advent of steam ships. If you like ships, this is a stunning display!

Masts of the tall ship Cutty Sark in Greenwich, England

Cutty Sark bow and keel

Our first port of call was north of the UK, at the Faroe Islands. We arrived on a cool, cloudy day which was lovely. No trees to speak of on this island, but lush and green were pleasant to see.

The bridge across the Atlantic Ocean (joins two islands!)

Village and church on the coast

Next we were off to Reykjavik, Iceland, where we overnighted in port. The first day was cool, wet, and cloudy all day - but we had fun touring in a monster truck going through rivers and lava fields!  Day two was as bright and brilliant as the first day was wet. We went on a bus tour back to some of the same places, but got an entirely different view with clear skies!

Tiny flowers growing from an 8000 year old lava field.

A lake near the coast under brilliant sky!

Our third stop was the Shetland Islands, the northernmost part of Scotland. It was lovely - we enjoyed a mild day, beautiful mountains, a perfect light lunch in a quilting shop/cafe/ham radio museum!

Wildflowers over the bay.

 

The Laird's manor house, overlooking the North Atlantic,

and towering above the ruins of a Viking village

The penultimate stop on the cruise was at a little village in Norway, at the end of the most scenic fjord in the country (well, some people said so!).  So we visited the Geirangerfjord, and it is breathtaking! I showed my name to some of the locals, and am still surprised that they didn't give me the key to the city - it's almost the same!  Again it was a cloudy, rainy, cool day, but the weather broke just long enough for us to capture some stunning images! Here are two of my favorites.

Geirangerfjord from way above (but not as high as we went - more later)

Geirangerfjord from not too far above!

Finally we returned to London for two final days. We had a great time, and saw some lovely sights. I feel like I could spend a month here and not see everything I want to see!  But we did spend several hours of loveliness at Kew Garden, the first botanical garden in the UK - oh my, so much color! Near the end of the second day we found our way to the Crusader's Church featured in The daVinci Code film, and there was one feature so stunningly unique that we just had to catch it!

Kew Garden in West London

Gargoyle at Crusader's Church (please click the image)

So there, in a quick look, is our summer trip last year! I promise to be more timely about posting any images from a trip this year if we ever get around to taking one.  And I may pop in a few more from last year here and there.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." - Mark Twain

Best to all! Mark

No Coincidences

I gave a guy a ride tonight. Sounds simple enough, right? But there was more to it than that. Let me walk you through it, and show how sometimes one thing happens that leads to another in ways you simply could never predict. And remember, there are no coincidences.

A few days ago I put a new battery in my motorbike – a Honda Wave. I call it that because it’s too big to be a scooter, but doesn’t have a proper gearbox so it’s not really a motorcycle either.  It’s not a bad ride but I wish it were a little bigger.  It has a 125 cc engine which is just enough to move me around ok.  Then again if it were any bigger I’d probably be in trouble all the time for speeding.  I haven’t had a battery that worked since I got the thing last year, so I thought it was time to have lights and horn and turn signals and a starter that worked. 

After I installed the new battery I was pretty excited about turning the key and pressing the start button, but felt pretty let down when I turned and pressed and nothing happened.  But by that point the sun was about to set and it would be quite dark very quickly, so I put it back together to ponder the mysteries of the motorbike electrical system.  

The next day a friend said something about it that led me to a new thought, so after work yesterday I thought I’d check it out, and sure enough the main battery fuse was burned out. And the kind Honda engineers had built in a placeholder for and filled it with a replacement fuse!  10 minutes later we were in business – lights, electric start, the works!

I had a pretty good day at work and got a lot done. I’m sure if you ask them my family can attest that I don’t keep a neat, tidy desk. In fact, when I am deep into a project, as I am now, my desk tends to look something like a train wreck.  But I know where everything is – it is filed in my head and can pretty much put my hand on anything I need in short order.

After work I came back to my flat with a very specific rank-ordered list of things to do – check my email to see if there were any messages that needed prompt attention, change clothes, take the old battery to the auto hobby shop on camp and see if they had a replacement fuse and ask if they knew anyone who could do an oil change for me, then ride it around the camp to give it some charge.

I usually don’t ride very far at a time – it is literally 5 minutes from my building to the gate at work.  I mostly walk during the fall, winter and spring, but when the heat index at 0700 is 112F (44C) it’s nicer to ride and not be soaked when you arrive at the office, which is normally kept a shivery cold 62-65F (17C). (I know, in the normal world that's not too bad. But when the outside temperature is double that, it's cold!)

So, I had a great plan, which fell apart during the read emails component when I fell asleep in my chair. I hate doing that. I finally woke up enough to realize what happened.  I got up, changed, and headed out to complete my list!  Wait!! Where’s my phone??  Search the room, look in my pockets, look on the floor, check my bag – no phone.  Must’ve left it at my office, which is always exasperating.  When you are on the other side of the world from your loved ones, the phone is something you keep handy.

OK, new plan, stop by the office to get phone after doing the other stuff.  So I got to the auto shop, which is full to the brim and overflowing with cars and people, but I parked and dropped off the battery in the battery drop off area, then walked to the empty desk right as the guy behind the desk arrived.  Remember about coincidences? Perfect timing #1.

He said they didn’t have any fuses that size, and I should check with a bike mechanic. I asked if he could recommend someone because several others I’d been referred to had dropped out of sight.  He said, oh, maybe we can still catch him, come on, and I followed him out through the door he had just come through.  We caught up to Charlie, who was about to leave, and I will now get my oil change a replacement fuse Friday (my weekend) morning!  Perfect timing #2. 

So I hop on the Wave and proudly hit the start button and rolled out to the street not long after sunset. For the record, it was about 98F, with a heat index of 117F (47C).  Looking to my right I saw a big yellow bus pull off the shoulder 200 yards down the road. Aramco has a small army of migrant workers who maintain the place, in brutal conditions some parts of the year (like now), and a bus ride to their camp at the end of the day is small comfort.  

worker harvesting dates

Looking to my left I see a worker in his yellow jumpsuit running raggedly in my direction, yelling and waving at the bus.  I looked back to the right and observed that the bus (or its driver) chose to not see this poor fellow and it lumbered on down the street.  This guy was small, thin, dark, and could have been from any of a dozen third world nations, imported for raw labor and low pay. But they come here in droves because whatever they earn here is double what they can earn at home.  Perfect timing #3.

My first mindless action was to turn in my intended direction, which was away from the guy and toward the dwindling bus. Suddenly my mind saw this poor guy walking miles, missing dinner, getting fined, and a dozen other instant mental pictures, and I was shouting to myself to go back and help.  So around we go, get back to him and pull over and asked, will they come back for you?  And this poor little man, heaving great deep breaths, after a long day’s work in the heat, from Nepal or India or Malaysia or somewhere, replies in broken but passable English, no sir, they go on, they not come back.  

(Of course at this point I was humbled and embarrassed by myself and the U.S. education system. This guy spoke enough English to understand and answer my question, and could probably do it in 3 or 4 other languages, and my brain can still only handle my home tongue.  It’s not that I didn’t have the opportunity to learn another language, but I wasn’t forced to and was too lazy to do it on my own.)

So here I am, giant Mark on a small motorbike, but I put the rear footrests down, patted the seat behind me, and told him to climb on. Must’ve been some picture, the two of us on my Wave – fortunately we didn’t cross paths when any security guys – chasing after his bus all the way across camp.  He told me where the bus was going, which I’d assumed, and I knew where that was, and we made the best speed I could without knocking him off or burning out the engine from the load.

We never saw the bus until we came right to the gate, and the bus was on the other side, but that was ok. Most of his co-workers were still on this side. They put everyone off the bus, drive the bus through, then take the workers through one at a time. Perfect timing #4.

My new friend hopped off the back and I figured he would sprint for the gate. But first he had to stop, bow, shake my hand, and tell me thank you, thank you sir, I so grateful thank you, all the while grinning ear to ear.  Then he ran to join his friends who had seen us and were calling to him, laughing.  It was a nice moment for both of us!

Mark's Wave!

Then I turned my wheels the other way, went to my office, and found my phone under a single sheet of paper, which I don’t even remember having in my hand today.  But if I hadn’t covered the phone with the paper, I wouldn’t have been delayed to look for my phone after I woke up from sleeping at my desk in my room.

This means I would have missed the bike mechanic, and would still need a fuse and someone to change my oil and filter and do a tune-up. I wouldn’t have seen the guy who missed his bus and ONLY ride to his quarters. I would have missed the opportunity to give him a wild ride across camp. He would have missed food and rest that he would sorely need tomorrow. 

He also would have missed the joy of experiencing someone doing something nice for him in a foreign land, and the gratitude that comes with it. And I would have missed the joy of being able to do something for a stranger, who I would never see again, knowing it would never be paid back and fine with that, because between us we both got immense benefit from the experience and it cost me nothing. I was going to go for a ride anyway!

So what’s the moral of this story?  First, trust your instinct and go with your feelings. They are there for you, built in pointers to show you the way – most of us just don’t bother to listen.  Second, doing something nice for someone, for no reason at all except to do a good thing, is a great feeling.  Watch for an opportunity and try it!

It was a nice night . Best to all, Mark