Our excursion began as we boarded a plane on Friday morning, August 1st, bound for Glasgow, Scotland. The ride was long and cramped, but fun. We arrived in Scotland at 9:30am on Saturday morning. We spent a good amount of time at the car rental place… they were very helpful (except that we thought they hadn't returned Matt's driver's license. This wasted a lot of our time later that evening by us being on the phone trying to track someone down who could help us. It was at this point that we realized something. People in Scotland go out of their way to help you with a happy heart, even if it doesn't benefit them AT ALL. Oh, BTW, we found the license... ha ha... it was in a VERY safe place!)
Remember that "helpfulness thing I mentioned about Scots? Another example: I had called the WRONG hotel for directions, but the girl on the other end still volunteered to help me as she found directions on Google!!! Anyway... Once we found our way out of the airport, we tried familiarizing ourselves with the Scotland motorway – the M8!!! Poor Matt had to adjust very quickly to driving a manual on the opposite side of the car on the opposite side of the road on a very busy “motorway” full of roundabouts and roads with no street signs!!! Well, after driving around for a few hours to our destination which was only 15 minutes away, we found ourselves at our hotel… the Albion… We had stopped to ask several different people for directions, and I came away with one thing… Scots are VERY polite and helpful!!! ☺ We had the sweet man who overheard me asking a clerk for help, chiming in, “I have a map,” and going to his car. He was adorable, and after a long explanation that included pictures of landmarks (LOL), we left… only to have to stop at a gas station for directions AGAIN!!! Another sweet man tried explaining how to get to the street we needed and finally decided to have us follow him there (I felt like we were on the Amazing Race!! Should we have paid him?)
We finally arrived at the hotel…a great experience, with sweet and helpful staff. We took naps and decided to walk the streets of Glasgow’s city centre! (We found out that our hotel was in the middle of the West End!! ...Where all of the nice restaurants are!!!) We had such a wonderful time walking the streets, going into what shops we could (most were closed) ☹, and had (of all things!) SUBWAY for dinner! ☺ We will be coming back to Glasgow at the end of our trip and will most likely save our nice dinner in the restaurant district for then. It was so beautiful with all of its old buildings and church steeples piercing the sky on almost every street corner. We didn’t even get back to our hotel until 11:00pm because it stayed light until about 10:40!!!
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