Houston

Finally time to leave the Scottish Highlands, after 10 days of travelling around. Loaded up the car and headed south towards our ultimate destination: Glasgow. Grabbed some takeaway sandwiches from a Gregg's outlet and after a couple of hours' driving arriving at our first stop: Loch Lomond. It was quite pretty here and we stopped a lookout to have our lunch. However there weren't many short hiking options around, and the scenery was nice but inferior to places we'd already been, so we moved on fairly quickly.

Arrived in Glasgow early afternoon, where we decided to head straight for the main thing we wanted to see: the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum. This is a large combination museum and art gallery that's part of the Glasgow university, and houses an enormous collection of works and objects. Apparently they have something like 150,000 pieces in their collection but only a small percentage are on display at any one time.

We headed first to the Salvador Dali painting of the Crucifixion which is very impressive and super unusual for Dali as he wasn't generally a religious painter. It was also a very controversial acquisition at the time, though these days it's generally regarded as a good thing. We also had a trawl through the Dutch art hall (Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Rubens and others), as well as the late 19th-century French room (Monet, Matisse, Cezanne and Renoir). Every painting was accompanied by a paragraph explaining the piece and what was important, rather than just the usual artist/date/material most galleries have. Very interesting.

Also checked out the museum wings, which had a large collection of taxidermied animals, ancient Egyptian objects including coffins and a mummy, a WW2 Spitfire fighter plane, and a bunch of weapons collected from across the world (mainly plundered by Scottish forces fighting for the British empire).

Left here late afternoon after a good few hours examining everything. We did a few laps through the centre of town, but although it looked nice enough nothing really enticed us out of the car. So we drove on to our accommodation, about 25 minutes west of the city - more of a village on the outskirts than actually part of the city suburbs.

We've got a whole apartment here so plenty of room to spread out, though we can't make too much noise as the owner and host live next door. But that's no problem. We settled in for a few hours then headed out for dinner. Since I'd had an upset stomach the day before, Shandos decided the perfect meal for tonight was curry! But Glasgow is famous for its curries, so I relented and we headed to an Indian restaurant about 10 minutes up the road. Food was excellent, and thankfully didn't repeat on me!Read more