A bad day out in Scotland
April 08, 2004After a beautiful day in Edinburgh yesterday, today was quite a bad day out in Scotland.
To start, we unfortunately missed booking a Highland tour to Loch Lomond, Trossachs and Stirling Castle. So we had to try to overcome this and went out to Balloch by ScotRail Railways. Balloch is at the very south of Loch Lomond and hosts also the National Park Gateway.
After a first orientation trip to find the information centre, we were faced with the fact that almost nothing is going on there right now. There were only two options: either going on an one hour cruising boat trip or going by bus to Luss. As we have seen the timetables for the local bus services there, we decided to go on the cruise. What a bad mistake! The cruise only went as far as the first large island of the Loch. Furthermore, the captain tried to make it interesting by telling some historical facts about all the larger houses along the banks of Loch Lomond. Well, all the new information we now know is, that a few houses had been built by rich people and have been converted to either luxurious hotels and/or appartments. By the way, Sir Sean Connery and also Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger stayed in one of the hotels. I think, that has been the breaking news of the day so far. When we reached the "harbour" again, we wanted to go back to Glasgow with the next train. Well, however, there was one thing we haven't reckoned with: The train we wanted to go back with, had just been cancelled. To add insult to injury, after waiting over fourty mintues in the cold somewhere in nowhere, the next train arrived albeit also delayed!.
Back in Glasgow, we had our lunch at Wetherspoon. This was the only bright spot of the day. The house where Wetherspoon is in is a quite old but nice pub directly located on St. Georges Square.Not such a bright spot since one meal was frozen and having narrowly escaped food poisoning, a refund was given.
Concluding that horrible day, we decided to go to a Chinese restaurant (The Dynasty, West Nile Street). What a bad mistake again ;-( One main course was almost everything excepting what we had ordered. My course was also rather worse than good. At least, we could get the total bad course be cancelled. However, the bill was still 20 GBP for that crap.
Now I am sitting in the hotel (Langs Hotel, Glasgow) and writing this blog entry!
