Paisley & Glasgow; Monday, 12 November, 2007

Another early morning fire alarm call courtesy, this morning, of a guest and their want for “crunchy” toast at 7am. After breakfast I quickly packed my things and headed out to Queen Street station to drop my bag off in the luggage lockers. After doing so I descended down into the Low level station and caught the train out to Dumbarton.

Like Edinburgh, Dumbarton has a lot of reminisces of once active volcanoes, and like Edinburgh it also has a castle built on the top of one, although in Dumbarton’s case it’s actually two volcanic plugs with a bit in the middle which forms a bizarre camel like hump rising up from the foreshore of the Clyde.

In the past it served as the westernmost outpost of the Scottish kingdom, when Bute and the other islands were still part of Norway. Mary Queen of Scots lived here, and it served as a prison for many of Scotland’s more infamous land owners (namely Early Patrick Stewart of the Orkneys and Shetlands)

Having looked around the castle and climbed up and down the nearly 600 steps, I headed back to the station and continued on a little further north to Balloch. The town, marks the point at which Loch Lomond becomes a river, for its short journey onto the sea.

The scenery round here is spectacular, but on a cold Novembers day, with the cloud starting to build, there is not much else to do, so I caught the train back into Glasgow.

By the time I arrived it was just before 3:30, so I decided to fill up my last couple of hours by taking the open top bus tour of the city, to see how much had changed in the five years since my last visit. In reality not much, there are still large building sites everywhere as the city in continually transformed and refurbished. If anything, in places, there were even more empty lots than there had been before. Whilst I was on the bus, thanfully in the covered part, the fine weather of the previous 48 hours decided to break, and a steady light rain started to fall. By the time I got back to George Square I still had well over three hours before my flight, but decided it was probably a good time to head for the warm and dry of the airport.

I picked up my bags from Queen street, walked the short distance to the bus station and caught the airport bus, out into the evening rush-hour traffic. I might have had three hours to make my flight, but some of my fellow passengers had obviously left things a little tighter, as there were some anxious tuts and fidgets coming as the bus crawled along the motorway, stuck in the rush hour traffic. A journey that should have taken 20 minutes took nearly 50, but I didn’t mind. I still had a long wait at the airport.