kate and graeme

aka: We had to go all the way to Glasgow to see an Aussie score a hat-trick

October 26-28

From the same competition that we got tickets to the football in Plymouth, we were also able to get tickets to go to Celtic Park to watch the Scottish Premier League match between Celtic and Motherwell. Glasgow being a not insignificant distance from our place, we split the trip into two legs, the first on Friday night took us as far as Warrington and then on Saturday morning we went the rest of the way to Glasgow. We parked at our hotel, not far from the city centre, and then set about exploring this city that we’d not actually visited yet. The weather was pretty dreary and our time available was restricted by kick-off time, so we didn’t really get up to much other than looking at buildings from the outside and eating some lunch.

Our walk to Celtic Park took us past many pubs packed with football fans and a LOT of green. We queued to collect our tickets and then headed into the ground, past the many policemen and women (and horses) that must spend at least one shift every week supervising the crowd at football matches. It was quite weird to use a modern ticket barcode scanner and then still have to squeeze through the old-style entry turnstiles. We had great seats behind the goal - we were a long way up but hardly any distance from the actual field. There was a great atmosphere, due just as much to the way the stadium was built as to the crowd - the noise just reverberated around the thing. They had some really cool songs that they clearly sing at every match and all went crazy when the team went into a huddle before kick-off. The match itself wasn’t too close, as Celtic were always that much better than Motherwell, though it was exciting to see Scott McDonald (an Australian striker, who played for Motherwell last season) score a hat-trick. The official attendance was 57,500 but I suspect a few thousand season ticket holders never quite made it. Also while the crowd were obviously not as into it as they could have been there was still a great atmosphere and you could imagine the wall of noise once they really got into it (vs Rangers or in Europe). All in all it was a great experience to go to the biggest ground in Scotland.

After the match we followed the crowd back into the city, caught the underground back to where we were staying and got some dinner. We didn’t do much more than that as both of us (Kate especially) were very tired.

The next morning we decided not to just blast back down the motorway but enjoy a bit of a drive through the Scottish countryside to get to Dumfries before rejoining the motorway to head into England. It really is a beautiful and quiet part of the world.

At lunch time and with the prospect of 5 hours of motorway driving ahead of us to get home we decided it would be nicer to go the longer way through the Lakes District and rejoining the motorway lower down. The lakes district is very beautiful, it is not too dissimilar to the Lochs area in the North of Scotland but not quite as impressive. We had fun winding our way around and stopping to eat our lunch on the bank of one of the lakes while watching some locals attempt to fish. Considering it wasn’t ideal holiday weather it was surprising to see the big towns in the area (Windermere especially) so full of people and we could imagine how busy the area must be in summer when you could ‘possibly’ do things like swimming.

We left the Lakes district in the middle of the afternoon and swiftly joined a traffic jam near Preston on the M6, with it taking us another 6 hours or so to crawl our way back to home (our fault for coming home on the last day of school holidays).

Click on the photo above to see my set from the 3rd and follow along with the commentary. Graeme was chief photographer on the 4th and hasn’t put his photos up yet, but I’ll edit when he has

We always wake up earlier on weekends that we are going away than any other day of the week. This time though, instead of interrupting our Saturday sleep-in, we were up and away before peak hour had really kicked in on a Friday morning, our travel plans being dictated by the date we could get Tattoo tickets. By 7.30 am we were at Kings Cross station, wondering what to do while we waited for them to announce which platform our 8am train would leave from. I pointed out platform 9¾ to Graeme, but we didn’t take photos or go up to it because we didn’t want to look too lame. We grabbed some drinks and a snack and sat and watched the crowd and the trains, then our platform was announced so we headed over and got on the train to Edinburgh. It wasn’t quite as exciting as the Hogwarts Express, but still the idea of catching the train from Kings Cross to Scotland was kind of nerdy cool, especially since I wasn’t the only person on the train reading one of the books.

We got into Edinburgh Waverley at lunch time, so we stopped at the first place we found and ate. Then we went for a walk through the park, past a burnt-out building still surrounded by firemen and some uninspiring street performers, then up towards the Royal Mile, stopping to look at the Museum on the Mound, which was about banking and money in Scotland and had some very cool old coins, showed how they made money and included £1000000 in cancelled out 20s. We spent several hours on the Royal Mile, watching street performers (and in Graeme’s case, performing), checking out shops and wandering through free exhibitions - basically doing the stuff that we hadn’t got around to last time we were there (last year, also at festival time, meaning we have no idea what regular Edinburgh is really like). After finding our accommodation, checking in, hanging out the window to take photos and convincing Graeme it wasn’t time for a nap, we walked back to the Royal Mile to find some dinner, stopping along the way to enjoy another street performer’s show.

By the time we were finished dinner it had gotten cold and the wind had picked up tremendously, so we considered going back to one of the shops closer to the castle, where Graeme had spotted some potential extra jackets, but instead we encountered the queue for the Tattoo, already packed and long with over 30 minutes until the gates even opened. So we just kind of milled about for a while, refusing to join the ridiculous queue that was now well down the road (unlike Europeans, we don’t consider queuing an enjoyable pastime, especially when so many people are likely to ignore the queue and just push-in) and then deciding to sit on the base of a statue and wait. Eventually we joined the massive throng of people headed up the narrowing street to the castle forecourt and finally got to our seats about 10 minutes after starting time, but it was OK because it started even later than that.

The Edinburgh Military Tattoo was on our list of ‘Things We Must Do Whilst in the UK’ and it didn’t disappoint. It was great to see it live and we enjoyed it thoroughly.

At the end, it was back into the scrum of people and slowly back to our room for the night. We kind of felt like we should be heading somewhere else, being the festival and all, but we were too tired.

Saturday morning we had a cooked breakfast and checked out before heading back to the point where we’d stopped our exploration of the Royal Mile the day before. As we wandered further down we discovered we were way too keen to get going and most things were still closed because it was before 10am. We reached Holyrood Palace, which marks the opposite end of the Mile to Edinburgh Castle, but decided against going in after we flicked through one of the books in the shop and figured it wouldn’t be worth the admission (we’ve seen enough palaces and castles to last a lifetime, so there has to be something special to attract us). Instead we headed around it and came to the base of a big hill we had seen from our room and had thought might be cool t climb. So we did. It was pretty long and parts were very steep, but the views we got over the city were worth it.

We headed back up the Royal Mile, stopping to get some fudge and then headed to Parliament Square where we sat on one of the big stone fence-rail-type things, watched some performers and ate some fudge (yum). Once we, along with about 10 others, got told we weren’t allowed to sit there for some ‘public safety’ reason, the place kind of lost its appeal (it was just ridiculous because the day before the place was constantly occupied by people, being the only thing anything like a place to sit in the area, but since it was now officially festival time, some power-tripping volunteer decided no-one could sit there). So we headed away from the festival and down into the park, which we wandered through for awhile. Running out of things to do, we decided to head for the shops in the hope of finding something to occupy us and maybe some food. We had lunch at TGI Fridays and then wandered along looking at the shops. Once we were sick of the crowds in all the shops, we headed to the park where we sat for awhile before going in search of some sandwiches to take on the train and then heading to the station where we caught the train back to London.