July 25 – August 17, 2025
Friday, July 25/Saturday, July 26 – Flight to Glasgow, Scotland via Keflavik, Iceland. Trevor drove us to the airport midday to make our 3:45 pm flight. Trevor and Megan will be house-sitting while we are away. Flight was about 7 hours to Keflavik, Iceland via Icelandic Air. Only things that were a bit less than great were the fact that we had seats next to an outside pillar on the A321LX, and so no window. The other was that every announcement by the flight crew was initially in Icelandic, which seemed to take a VERY long time for each one. Food we preordered was pretty good, like lasagna and a salad with meat and mozzarella cheese. Very good chocolate brownie cake for dessert. 3 1/2 hour lay-over in Keflavik. Then another 2 hour Icelandic Air flight to Glasgow. Where we arrived about 12:30 local time but a day later so Saturday, the 26th.
It was very easy to get through passport control. We scanned our own passports and were through very quickly. We were only taking a roller bag and a smaller backpack as personal items. Our roller bags would be hauled by the tour company when we were on the West Highland Way.
There was a bus directly from the airport into Glasgow. We ended up pulling our bags about 15 min through the city to our first hotel, the Aparthotel Adagio. The hotel seemed very busy but we were in our room pretty quickly. It was very much like an apartment with washer and dryer.
We rested up some but got hungry and thirsty by 5pm local time. We didn’t go far for food – just across the street to the Hootenanny Bar where we had beer and chicken burgers. The beer selection was not what we expected and ended up having a local ale.
Sunday, July 27 – Walking tour of Glasgow. Glasgow is known as one of the rainiest cities in the world. It was pretty damp today but our new rain jackets were just perfect. We started out walking east up the Clyde River toward the Glasgow Commons. It’s just a big green park with many trees. From there we walked toward the Necropolis, a large cemetery on the highest hill in Glasgow. While we walked, the rain spit here and there but nothing serious. We walked all the way around the Necropolis the wrong way to find the entrance. When we did find the entrance, we wandered through numerous crypts and mausoleums looking at the dates of death. These were not too ancient – early 1700s but not before. The William Wallace Memorial was of interest and inspired us to plan to watch Braveheart again (which we did later and enjoyed, despite the almost constant blood and gore). As our hunger was calling, we stopped into the Drygate Bar and Kitchen before our tour of the Tennant Brewery.
The brewery is the largest by size and volume of sales in Scotland. It cost us about £20 for each of us for the tour. We thought it would be a craft brewery and were sort of disappointed it wasn’t. But we were not disappointed for long. The guide was so entertaining and fun that it turned out to be quite fun! From there we went back to Drygate and had steak and ale pies for dinner with another Nightmare of Cake stout. We hoped we would find more of that down the road. By the end of dinner, we were ready to go back to the hotel and watch the movie we planned to.
Dogleggers on the Trail 