A 3 foot X 4 foot oops (Scotland to Iceland 5)

 We certainly didn’t expect such hot weather in Glasgow. It was up to +30 some days and that is way too hot for me. Plus, we were on the fourth floor of the hotel, and I can say with absolute certainty that heat rises. In order to try to keep the guests from melting into puddles, the hotel purchased a bunch of swamp coolers. Ours didn’t work and when one of the young women from the front desk came up to help with it, she ended up with a free physics lesson. I sat back and observed as she and Richard tried to trouble-shoot the problem. In the end we got another cooler that worked - sort of.

View from our top floor room

If you put tap water in it you didn’t get a cooler room: what you did get was a very muggy hot room. The solution to this was to make several trips to the ice machine with the ice bucket, fill the cooler with ice and then top it off with water. This operation made sitting and doing nothing just about bearable. We looked forward to getting on the ship because the AC there works, sometimes too well, but it works.

While in Glasgow we mainly focused on staying cool. We took a walk over to the hotel where we were to meet the Adventure Canada group. We wanted to see how long it took us and make sure we knew where we were going.  The last day in the hotel we found an air- conditioned tea shop in a mall. I wanted to pick up some fruit tea to make iced tea on the ship. We were met by a lovely lady named Annie. On hearing our accents she wanted to know all about our trip. She told us it was her birthday so we sang “Happy Birthday” to her in the middle of the shop. She let me try several of the fruit teas and I ordered a chai latte. On the ship tea and coffee is available almost any hour of the day or night but the selection is limited. I found out that they had a chili chai, one of my favourites. Annie asked me if I wanted to try it. I told her I didn’t need to: I knew I would like it. I bought fruit tea, chili chai, tea filters because the chai was loose rather than in bags. Then we headed back to our hotel.

Adventure Canada check in

On Wednesday June 14 we walked to the Adventure Canada hotel and joined those milling around in the lobby. We picked up our various bits of identification and headed out for lunch. On the Adventure Canada trips much of the people moving is done by means of colour groups.This year we were in the blue group and were one of the later groups to board buses to take us to the port of Greenock, a 40 minute drive from Glasgow. I hadn’t done my geography homework and expected us to leave from the city of Glasgow itself.

Emirates air crew

As we sat outside in the bus waiting to leave we saw an air crew from Emirates airlines and were quite interested in the uniforms the women were wearing, very different from the airlines we are used to travelling on. The bus ride was hot and when we got to the ship a couple of disappointments awaited us. There is a particular configuration of cabin that we like and we had asked for it in our pre-tip emails. This cabin has a bit of a sitting room, a bedroom and, most importantly, two bathrooms. It’s a luxury but it makes things so much easier when we both have to be somewhere at a given time. The cabin we were assigned to had only one bathroom. Richard allowed time for everyone to get onboard and then went to chat with the Adventure Canada  staff. They apologized and didn’t know if they would be able to change our cabin for the first trip but, since we were on back to back trips, they said they would rectify the situation on the second half of our voyage. We weren’t delighted but knew we could make it work.

The second disappointment came when we attended the first information session. The plan was to set sail that night. MJ, our expedition leader, informed us as gently as he could that the ship had docked in a strong wind which had pushed it onto and dragged it along the pilings on the side of  the dock. The dock is sized for huge container ships and the pilings acted as a very efficient can opener on our relatively small vessel. The result was a 3X4 foot hole in the bow on the starboard side. We weren’t going anywhere until the hole was patched. The patch job was complicated by the ship’s ice hardened hullwhich consists of a double layer of steel. There was a boundary fence set up on the dock beside the ship. This allowed welders to work safely and discouraged us from taking photos. The next day we ate dinner with a local woman who was volunteering as an interpreter for tourists. Before she retired she had been a marine insurance adjuster. She told us that the insurance companies would be fighting it out for years to determine who was liable for the hole in the hull. There was a licensed pilot onboard at the time. I managed to get a photo later in the trip when the hole was patched but the painting hadn’t been finished. It was quite a spectacular patch.

The patch

So what do you do with a boatload of people who expect to be sailing in the Scottish Islands but are stuck on a boat in port for an unknown length of time? Luckily Adventure Canada is well practiced at responding to such situations and they quickly concocted an alternate plan. Stay tuned for the next instalment to find out what we did while living on that ship in Greenock.

And, and, and

Okay. This is going to be a bit of a whine but also a bit of an explanation as to why the posts about the summer in Scotland and Iceland have been so slow in coming.

I said in the post I just uploaded that I’ve been in the shop having a good time, and that’s true. The part I didn’t tell you is that I’ve been procrastinating. That will be no surprise to some of you. There are a bunch of annoying little things, mostly to do with technology, that have dampened my enthusiasm for getting on with the posts about the summer.

There’s always the issue of how to handle photos, not necessarily which ones to put into the blog, but where to store them, how to access them, and how to coax them from wherever they happen to be hiding into the blog. I’ll spare you the details except to say that I work on a Mac and it wants to have absolute control of where I store my photos and how I handle them. The blogging software I use is a Google product and Google wants to have absolute control over where I store my photos and how I access them. I use my Android phone a good deal and Google is happy with that. The Mac? Not so much. I also used a regular camera on the trip and have two sets of photos to wrestle into some sort of order. I know: it’s a first world problem and I could solve it by using one device to take pictures and sticking with one platform or the other. Only one problem: I don’t want to! I like the Mac and the Android phone. I don’t want to change the software I use to publish the blog partly because I’ve been using it for 15 years.

I don’t seem to think in the same way as the folks who are responsible for photo and blogging software do. I set out to do something that seems like it should be simple and it turns out not to be. I want to be able to search for a photo by date and not lose it. To do this I need to download the photo and then upload it. The thumbnails are so small I have to guess at which photo I want or write down the number. Once I figure out where a photo is and manage to get it into the post, why can’t I drag and drop it where I want it? It’s way easier to write and post a blog entry within a couple of days of when I take the photos on my phone. I’m a bit late for that on the Scotland to Iceland story.

Another thing that drives me bats is how to notify you when there’s a new post. I could solve this one by just setting up a regular schedule for writing and posting and sticking to it. Then everyone would know what to expect. Again, I don’t want to. I enjoy writing the blog, mostly, and I don’t want it to become a job. I tend to write when I want to say something and that’s not always predictable. If anyone is going to read the blog I figure it’s only fair to let you know that there’s something new to look at.

When I do send an email notice some of you get it and some of you don’t. I’ve tried several different ways to notify you. Some providers seem to think I belong in the spam folder. I’m okay with that but I’d like you to have the chance to decide rather than having them decide for you. Some of the methods I’ve tried result in my messages bouncing back. I don’t even make it to the spam folder. I’m looking into another way of notifying people but that isn’t without its own issues and it’s another thing that gets in the way when I think of writing a blog post.

So there you have it. I’m hoping that by acknowledging all these little irritations I’ll feel less like running and hiding whenever I think of producing content for my few loyal followers. In my ideal world the technology would be easy to use and would be at my service. I feel as though I’m at the service of technology. At this point I’m tempted to forget about the rest of the Scotland to Iceland trip but I know some of you want to read about it and I promised I’d cover it in the blog. There are some good stories to be told from that trip so stay tuned. I appreciate your support.

Glasgow (Scotland to Iceland 4)

I’m finally back to the blog. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the shop making boxes and thoroughly enjoying myself. That’s for another post. For now let’s go back to June 2023 and Glasgow, Scotland.


Tuesday June 13, 2023

We generally come north in the summer to avoid the heat. Turns out it’s unseasonably hot in Glasgow right now. +29C in the forecast for today. The locals are all very happy about the nice weather. I was absolutely delighted in Inverness where highs got to +18C. No matter where I am, when the temperature goes above +25C my main objective is to remain cool regardless of what that looks like.

Yesterday we tried to book a bike tour for today but they were sold out. No surprise there. It seems you can often get a tour if you book two days in advance whereas trying to do it the day before is pushing it. So, this morning we are hanging around the room with the swamp cooler running and the fan above the stove also running. Our theory is that the stove fan will suck hot air out. We are on the fourth floor and we can attest that heat rises.

On every holiday I discover something and there have been a couple of important discoveries so far on this one. The first is that we make our own holiday and just because something is in a guide book doesn’t mean we have to see it in order to have a good time. In fact we’ve reinforced the idea that we’re happier with ‘the road less travelled by.’ Yesterday as we walked around the city we saw a large crowd at the end of the street. Rather than going in that direction, we decided not to go there. We haven’t been inside a church or a museum and that’s okay. We are having a good time in our own way, walking the streets, listening to the various accents, reading the interesting signs in shop windows, observing the slate shingles on the roof outside our window, trying to quickly sketch people at the train station as we waited for our train from Inverness to Glasgow. I know a lot of people would tell us that we could just as easily do these things at home whereas we can’t go into Edinburgh Castle at home. This is true, and it’s also true that we can make our own fun in our own way.

Yesterday we spent a lovely few hours in a vegan restaurant that was also a vinyl record store. The food was excellent; it was relatively cool, and the people-watching was fun. Today I’m catching up on blog posts and emails until it’s time for lunch. Yesterday while I was doing laundry I picked up a book from the book exchange in the laundry room. It was a good beach read and I finished it in one sitting, something I hardly ever do. It was a good day. A holiday is meant to be a change from normal routine and that will look different to different people.


Another thing we’ve discovered on this trip is that cycle tours are a lot of fun. This is a surprise to me because I thought that riding on the left would be an issue. With a bicycle guide it’s pretty easy to remember what side to ride on and the two tours we have been on so far have taken us on bike paths or very calm streets, another advantage of being with a local. The groups have been small, 6-8 so there are not endless lines of cyclists all trying to get somewhere at the same time. We have experienced that on some of the tandem tours of Europe we have been on and found it rather stressful.

Tomorrow we will meet up with the Adventure Canada crew and head out on the Ocean Endeavour. As for the rest of today, we’ll just have to see. Lunch is on the program as is packing. Other than that we’ll just do whatever strikes our fancy and the beauty of doing that in a place other than home is that there are no chores demanding attention so we can truly do as we please.