Glasgow, Scotland, June 23, 2022

 June 23, 2022

I slept well and woke up around 7:30am. We went to breakfast down in the bar and there were lots of good choices. We sat by a girl with a terrible cold and congestion which made me uncomfortable. Cathe and I are vaccinated against Covid, but Covid was on the rise. During our time in Scotland, one in seventeen people had Covid. Unfortunately, Cathe came down with a cold a few days after we got to Scotland and was congested for almost a week. I caught it as well for about three days. Was it actually Covid? We never tested ourselves, so we don't know.

After breakfast we walked Buchanan to find a post office. I decided to mail a post card to John every day. We also wanted to explore trying to mail our extra things to ourselves at the end of the West Highland Way trail. However, we discovered that Scotland has no general delivery option. We returned to the outdoor store where Pounce returned her belt for a narrower one and her umbrella for a little purse. We both bought fuel for our hiking stoves.

We picked up groceries and also took a bus tour around Glasgow after we ate salads from Spriggs on the steps of the Modern Art Museum. The bus driver had such a Scottish accent that I only understood about one in four words.

Modern Art Museum

Murals from a mural competition a few weeks ago

We did more grocery shopping and then had dinner at Sloans - a super cute bar with outside alley seating. I had a salad with haggis and tatties croquettes. Pounce had a beef pie with salad. Very savory!

Dinner at Sloans. Cheers!

We came back to the hostel and did laundry in the coin operated laundry machines. We were trying to figure out how to bounce our extra things to the end of the trail and began to explore luggage services. We had a reservation for Ewich House in a week but figured we'd probably be beyond that point and would have to possibly take a bus or train back to it. We had tried not to make many reservations in advance because we did not want to be too tied down to a specific schedule and for the most part this plan worked well for us, especially since later on the trains were on strike and could have derailed us if we'd had firm plans. The plan was to take the train to Milngavie the next morning to start the West Highland Way.

Jet lag was kicking in and I had a hard time getting to sleep and finally got up and went down to the dining room at 11:30pm so I could call John using wifi calling. It was annoying not to have wifi in the privacy of my own room. I signed up for AT&T's international plan of unlimited internet and wifi calling for $10 a day before I left for Scotland. It worked well if we had wifi but if we didn't I had no service. 

There were several groups of young people in the dining room. One group seemed to be from Spain. I really like the international feel of a hostel and I usually do not mind roughing it a bit. The wonky wifi was a problem, though, especially since it made planning our bounce box even more challenging.