Scotland 2013

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We will visit Scotland June 11 to 25, 2013. Here are some details of our trip, which include minutia about planning; I probably spent more time preparing than the total trip time!

We’ll stay in an apartment in central Glasgow to reduce costs and increase comfort (we can eat some meals at home, wash and dry clothes, and have more space than in a hotel room). I began planning the trip last fall; apartments often get booked far in advance, especially if they are inexpensive. I found a 2-bedroom apartment near Central train station for 680 British pounds for two weeks, or $1088, and reserved it in October. I sent a deposit of 100 pounds via Paypal and will pay the remainder in cash when we arrive. I was able to get foreign currency without a delivery charge and a good exchange rate at Bank of America. I made the flight reservations in January. Since we wanted to have seats that were only two in a row, I had to do a lot of research to find which planes had that configuration. I ended up booking through KLM, which is aligned with Delta, but the Delta website didn’t let me view all of the available flights. We will have 2 stopovers, in Seattle and Amsterdam. We leave San Francisco around 10am June 10 and arrive in Glasgow around 10am June 11 (note that there IS an 8-hour time change in addition to the almost 16-hour travel time).

Our apartment is near two main train stations as well as the Argyll Glasgow Underground station, plus there are many frequent buses, eliminating the need for us to drive, which we learned from past experience is not advisable for us to do. On June 13 we will take a train to Kirkcaldy and meet up with David, a guy we met on a boat during our last trip to Scotland, and he will drive us around the coast of Fife. Fife (actually called the Kingdom of Fife) is north of Edinburgh, with the Firth of Forth, a body of water similar to a bay, in between. There are several picturesque fishing villages, such as Anstruther, along the Fife coast.

The next day we will meet up with longtime family friends Rosemary and Peter, and they will show us around St. Andrews, which is north of Fife’s east coast. We will stay in Dundee that night and they will show us the sites around that area the next day. We’ll return to Glasgow via train the evening of June 15, and Kirk will run in the Mens Health Forum Scotland 10K run at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow on June 16.

Our schedule is pretty flexible after that. We plan to attend Glasgow’s West End Festival, which runs the whole month of June, and includes many concerts, fairs, plays and other events. There is also a boat tour on the Clyde River that we hope to go on, and it stops at the new Riverside Transport Museum.

We will visit Edinburgh and see some sites we missed on previous trips, such as the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Gladstone’s Land (which is a house), and Dean Village, one of the oldest areas of Edinburgh.

We plan to go on a canal boat tour from the Linlithgow Canal Centre to the Avon Aqueduct on June 22 or 23. This aqueduct was built between 1819 and 1822 and is 86 feet high. This will be a challenge for me with my acrophobia but it’s something I want to do (not sure if I will be brave enough to get out of the boat, however). We visited Linlithgow, which is a few miles west of Edinburgh, during our last trip to Scotland and enjoyed dinner at the Four Marys pub. We hope to do that again after the boat trip - I will probably be needing a pint by then!

Other than the abovementioned plans, I’m sure there will be a lot of exploring and picture taking, especially of the amazing Victorian buildings in Glasgow as well as other beautiful scenery. Now to get through the long flights and stopovers on the way there!

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Photos

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Why you should always look up in Glasgow!