Northern Ireland - Round The World Tour 2 2003 Day 189

Glasgow

Wednesday 17th September

Today is our fifteenth anniversary. Actually, yesterday was too. That’s the beauty of having married twice in as many days (first for the law and then for the church), I get to legitimately forget the first date with the safety net of the second to always fall back on in need. In all the fifteen years, however, I’ve never needed the safety net. I remember thinking that we would be in China at this time. Amazing how fate has brought us to Scotland instead. Other than getting Sandy a new ring to celebrate the occasion (which she picked out when we were in Ireland), we’ve not really done much in the way of celebrating the sixteenth and seventeenth of September this year. We don’t typically do much to celebrate our anniversary but when we are back in Holland, I’m sure we will find some special way to mark the occasion.

Another leisurely start to the day meant that it was fast approaching noon before we even got out of the camp-site this morning. It wasn’t a long run into town and we went straight to the tall ship for our first tourist stop of the day. The plan was to park the brick there for the remainder of the day and use the hop-on hop-off bus ticket that we purchased yesterday for all the travelling around we were going to do. Ultimately, however, we didn’t use the tickets and did very little travelling around either.

We explored the tall ship Glenlee for a while before moving on to the Scottish Science Centre just across the river after lunch in the brick. This is where we spent the rest of the day. The science centre is a huge place with literally hundreds of interactive exhibits on display over three floors. We even got to see an IMAX showing of ‘T-Rex – back to the Cretaceous’ in 3D.

One of the exhibits at the science centre was an Internet terminal that was supposed to be used for exploring several science related websites. There was no physical keyboard but the software provided for a touch screen equivalent. Both Sandy and I, being as industrious as we are, took the opportunity to check our Internet based e-mail. One that got me a little excited was in regards to the possibility of a few months' worth of contract work in Heerlen. This would be absolutely ideal for us and it would fit neatly into our continued travel plans. After a little consideration, I replied to let the contracting firm know that we would be willing to suspend our current travelling to meet the deadline of a begin date of September twenty second, just a few days from now. Hopefully, I will receive either a phone call or an e-mail tomorrow with more details.

In the meantime, we decided not to drive off into who knows where in search of a place to park for the night. The car park here at the science centre seems to be as good a place as any so we’ve enjoyed a cooked meal in the brick and watched a DVD.

There must be some kind of BMW & Mercedes car convention that took place at the science centre this evening. A couple of hours ago, hundreds of BMWs and Mercedes cars turned up here in the car park. There were some cars under covers inside the science centre earlier that I noticed and I think it might have been the unveiling of a new model or some such thing. Actually, it was quite amusing seeing all the people leave the centre and going in search of their own cars amongst hundreds of identical models.