Glasgow to London

 Our last day for our Britrail passes. The train was ScottRail for the first leg so not very fancy....just 50 minutes to Edinburgh...transfered to the nicer LNER train for the remaining 5+ hours.

I'll just share some sights out the window. 

Lovely farm land and the view goes on for seemingly miles. 

Neat little towns. 

Pretty countryside. 

Not sure but I think this is probably clover.

And sheep of course!

I know, I'm sharing food photos...but it's part of the fun for me!  I chose a yummy hummus/chickpea/sweet potato/cous cous salad. The crew kept us busy offering tea and biscuits several times. 

Before we knew it, we were at London Kings Cross station. We needed to transfer all the way over to Heathrow Airport to be close to our hotel. Our Britrail passes include that travel, but it was via Thamslink, a railway we hadn't used before. But after several stops asking friendly attendants, we found the right train.  

One more transfer over to the Elizabeth line would take us directly to Heathrow.

The subway train was the busiest we'd seen!  Weekends apparently bring everyone out about town. 

Easy peasy walk out of the terminal at Heathrow to a city bus.  

Another very kind driver made sure we got off at the correct stop for hotel.   We have really enjoyed public transportation on this trip!

 So the rest of this post is just me having a bit of fun. We immediately noticed that the hotel room overlooks the runways at Heathrow...so I had a bird's eye view of landing aircraft. A plane landed every minute or so!  I had plenty of time to kill, so I sat by the window for about a half hour and these are some of the different airlines that landed. There were dozens of British Airways planes that landed but I didn't take very many repeat photos of them.  Not a single American branded aircraft landed while I was watching. 

British Airways

Iberia Air

Korean Air

Air India

Malta Airlines

Virginia Atlantic

Schenzin Airlines

Tianjian Airlines (had to look that one up!)

Sri Lankan Airlines

Vistara Airlines (India)

Air India

Air China

Air Lingus (Ireland)

Air Baltic

And finally,  Qatar Airlines.  I forced myself to stop but it was fun!  

Tomorrow we'll be up early for the 8 hour flight back to RDU after a great/fabulous/wonderful  trip!

Glasgow, Scotland

 Today’s excitement was a short train trip west to the little town of Balloch on Loch Lomond. 

The train was almost empty leaving Glasgow station…..

And then a gaggle of schoolchildren boarded a few stops later…

Generally well behaved but made our hour on the train less relaxing for sure!!

Arrived at Balloch to grey skies.  First really “private boater” marina we’ve really seen.  This is on a river feeding Loch Lomand.

The main purpose of the trip was to tour the large park there with castle ruins .  

Of course there was a lot of conflicting information online about the castle. It apparently is closed for long-term renovations and doesn’t look like it’ll be opening anytime soon.  But wonderfully maintain grounds.

I plan to hike the 3.5 mile loop Winney Hill to a spectacular overlook for the billing. It was a lovely walk through well-maintained forest path.

But the overlook I also wanted to see of Loch Lomand Was closed because they were doing a bunch of tree trimming. Very disappointing! But the walk was still invigorating.

Some misty views back into Town and small views of Loch Lomand.

For those of you humming the tune of the song, thanks to my sis-in-law I know know the song’s origin: Loch Lomond" tells the story of two Scottish soldiers who were so imprisoned. One of them was to be executed, while the other was to be set free. According to Celtic legend if someone dies in a foreign land, his spirit will travel to his homeland by "the low road" - the route for the souls of the dead.

After about 4 miles of hiking, we were back on the manicured park grounds.

Trail took us to the shore of the Loch  

I don’t think I’ve really mentioned it, but there are gorgeous rhododendrons everywhere! Mostly they are the light lavender ones that we see at home, mixed with some pink and white ones. But these beautiful purple ones really stand out!

There is a lovely wild garden as well, and whoever the groundskeeper is makes having lush vegetation look easy!

Back over the bridge to the train station, we made a fairly early day of it. Still 20,000 steps in, and a lot of them were uphill!

Back on the train to Glasgow, there were a few murals on buildings. In for early night, will be traveling now towards home.