Glasgow & Loch Ness

The rest of day two was alot better than I could ever have expected.

I met up with a new friend who offered to take me around and show me a few sights and sounds of Glasgow.

Shopping, rock music pub, cinema, restaurant and tattoo parlour were all the places which we visited for a day the likes of which i will not soon forget.

The more I wandered around the more that I found that Glasgows soul was not non-existant but far more subtle than I first expected.

There were no tartan kilt wearing men or drunken louts hanging around in bars or having bad harmony singing contests at the top of their voices. Russ Abbott has done them a great disservice in his comedy show of yester-year.

The prices of everyday things were reasonable priced regardless of this being a major city.

Back in the hotel it was a one more quiet night when I went to bed at about midnight, and gone were all my big bets - so no more dreaming of riches galore. The three world cup results had officially killed off all my chances of winning more than what I put in.

The next morning I arrived early to be at the coach pickup point for the trip to the Highlands and Loch Ness. It was very low key and unassuming but the trip did have about a dozen or so of people from all around the world.

Although I did have enough confidence to sit next to a girl that
caught my eye from the get go, as it did often stop at places for a stretch-your-legs break, it gave me a chance to open up conversation and it turned out she was a delightful girl from the french city of Quebec, Canada.

Plenty of towns with unbronouncable names come and gone, and I learned that "Inver" means in the mouth of the river ... so Inverness is the town in the mouth of the River Ness.

The other part of the coach tour was listening to a running commentary in any language you wanted. I did try some in Spanish, but it was just too fast and too obscure to understand. When I switched ot English I realised why, as it was all about the many bloody massacres and murders that fill the Scottish highland historical timeline.

<<Hardly the kind of thing you would learn about in the basic spanish phrasebook, ha ha.>>

Also a few songs and their origins, like "Take the High Road" or "Donald Wheres Your Trousers" broke up the hours of driving. The trip was a 450 miles round trip.

The only thing that upset me a bit on the journey, was that the roads were all tree lines on both sides and so it was almost impossible to take any photos from the coach window as we drove by, without just getting a blur of green.