On bicycles

So I mentioned this on Twitter, but it bears further description.

This morning, a friend and I rode our bicycles to brunch. Even while riding, we continued to learn about one another, strengthening our friendship.

Afterwards, I drove a neighbor to his first experience with the Lock 4 mountain bike trails (my first visit in three years). We learned a thing or two about endurance, fear, and that you shouldn’t pass out in a car full of whipped cream bottles, because the police take issue with that. (No, that wasn’t us.)

Arriving home, I noticed another friend had called. Turns out he was riding about town, so I hopped back on the bike and met him above the river. We visited vacant industrial buildings with “for sale” signs on them, at once lamenting the businesses leaving them behind and sharing our dreams of the possibilities enabled by those same spaces.

Afterwards, I explored some more, and on my way home saw an artistic acquaintance watching a train, his bicycle parked behind him. I joined him for a while, imagining where the train was going and where it had been, trying to see if the bridge flexed beneath its weight, and experiencing the visual illusion of seeing the bridge appear to move sideways even after the train had stopped for a moment.

Finally, just a block from home, a neighbor was riding the other way. We chatted for a bit, enjoyed a beer on his back porch, and discussed motorcycles, golf, and aging. Turns out he’s had an entire career in law enforcement and is now doing something entirely unrelated that he also enjoys.

Bicycles (theirs and mine) made each interaction possible: by enriching the interaction, providing an excuse for a meeting, or simply by putting us in the right place at the right moment.

I believe I will always keep a bicycle at hand.

 

If you’re not with us, you’re against us!

Groups of people can truly accomplish great things. Some really awful things, too, but mostly good.

What I don’t entirely understand myself is why many groups feel a need to define themselves in some part by what they’re against. I was reading Let’s Go Ride a Bike’s post about the bicycle-centric Tour de Fat (by New Belgium Brewing Company), and it sounded like a fun event that I’d go out of my way to attend someday.

Except for one thing. Apparently the event also has a strong undercurrent of anti-automobile going on, and I have trouble with that. I think bicycles are great, and I love riding. I ride to lunch often, I ride the occasional singletrack on my mountain bike, I enjoy 20-50 mile rides on the road bike, and I can have the time of my life exploring the streets of a city like NYC on a rental bike. I ride enough that people I know through business ask if that was me they saw riding down West End at lunchtime.

But I also love cars! Love ‘em. I love motorcycles and scooters, too. And so I just don’t think I can get into Tour de Fat, because rather than just celebrating the bicycle, they’re demonizing the car. Is it not possible to enjoy and promote bicycles without saying cars suck? Maybe next year they’ll drop the negativity — and get closer to town than a seven-hour drive.

 

Travel Day

(Time to finish the travelog; sorry for the delay!)

Friday the 28th was another travel day, spent from Glasgow to Belfast. After a lesuirely morning in Glasgow, we walked back to Glasgow Central train station and got on a diesel-powered train to Stranraer. I note that the train was diesel simply because every other rail-borne conveyance we’ve stepped aboard on this trip has been electric, and thus totally quiet at rest. The diesels had to warm up for a few minutes before we took off, so it was suddenly strange to be sitting still and hear noise coming from below the floor.

Since it was daylight (unlike London-to-Glasgow), we got to see the countryside. The day was perfectly clear and the views quite nice. I’m not a big fan of photos shot through windows, however, so the camera stayed in its bag.

 

Thursday was driving

So I didn’t say much about Thursday yet. Simply put, we took a drive into the Highlands, north of Glasgow. If you fetch a map, say, like this one, you’ll see more precisely where all we went.

The rental car was a Vauxhall Corsa. Two years ago, Bob Lutz said Saturn would build a version of the Corsa. More recently, that seems unlikely, and I suspect with fuel prices back down, they’ll blow it off. Pity, since it’s actually a nice little car. Our copy had a peculiar steering arrangement whereby the driver sits on the right side of the car and shifts with his left hand. This one was even a manual transmission, so I finally got to see how that feels. It feels strange — I felt like I couldn’t shift as smoothly or as quickly as in the States because my left arm isn’t trained to make those motions. Every now and then, especially when coming to a stop after being on the road a while, I’d move my right hand into the door to reach for an imaginary gearshift outside the car. Mostly I fared just fine, though. We note that on a right-hand drive car (RHD), the three pedals are in the same orientation as with LHD, so that end of things was easy. Here’s what it looks like. Pretty basic 5-door hatchback. Not beautiful, but not ugly, either. Typical of General Motors, perhaps.

We did stop a few times, when the scenery was just too much not to stop and take it in for a moment. Once was near the end of a very narrow section of road skirting the west side of the north end of Loch Lomond, Scotland’s biggest lake. After passing through a two-way traffic light (which controls traffic on a single-lane section of road), on the left appears this giant… rock. With a grotto carved into it. (And lucky for us, a tiny place to pull the car over to take photos.)

Next up it was time for a break. We stopped at the next “tea room” sign, which was attached to the train station at Crianlarich. That had closed on 1 November for the winter, so we continued into the little town itself and found The Rod & Reel, a sort of roadhouse that said it served food all day. Strange little place, it was. Peg ordered haggis with neeps and tatties (that would be haggis with parsnips and potatoes), and we split a beer, though I forget what brand it was. And apart from taking care of our order, not one word was spoken to us by the folks there, even though it was empty apart from maybe three obvious regulars. Maybe we should have sat at the bar?

Onward from there, we passed through an (open) gate that closes the road for snow. It seems the stretch of road just beyond that gets a lot of snow as a result of its topography. In fact, on the return trip, that very section of road had a good inch of slush between the tire tracks. Luckily it was only like that for one or two miles. (I don’t think the Corsa has skid control, and I didn’t really want to test it.)

Still heading north, we spent a bit of time in a moderately flat area, then up a long and gradual hill, until…

Not much else to say about that. Just a “wow” moment with a convenient place to stop and take pictures until my hands were too cold to hold the camera.

Eventually we reached the start of the footpath to Ben Nevis, which is the tallest point in Scotland and in the the British Isles. You can’t see it from the footpath, and starting the 6-8 hour journey after sunset is an exceptionally bad idea, so we snapped some photos and turned back towards Glasgow. Here’s the teaser shot — it’s dark and uncorrected, but it conveys what we saw pretty well.

 

Really, Wednesday: Glasgow Museum of Transport

Waiting on the train for the ferry to Belfast, so there’s time to write.

Wednesday truly was unplanned, as promised. So, we walked to the other side of town to visit the Glasgow Museum of Transport. Unlike Nashville’s beloved Lane Motor Museum, Glasgow’s collection covers the entire history of transport, from the boneshaker bicycle and horse-drawn carriage, on up to trains, modern cars, and airplanes. Despite being a publicly-owned museum, they do have a sense of humor/humour. One car is on display with a parking boot normally reserved for illegally parked cars, while others have steering wheel locks on them. The sign on one such car, the 1969 Ford Capri, makes a joke that because “Fords in the 70s and 80s were not noted for their security, the Capri was also pretty popular with car theives.”

It’s always a nice surprise to see things I’m not already familiar with at a transportation museum, and Glasgow held its own here. I had not seen the Lagonda “tricar” from 1905. It’s an unusual configuration to say the least — the passenger rides up front, sitting over the front axle. The driver is in the rear, with a steering wheel and sitting over the single rear drive wheel. The engine lies under the steering, between driver and passenger. With 12 horsepower, the Lagonda succeeded in a non-stop London-to-Edinburgh endurance drive in 1905. On modern roads that trip is 400 miles, or farther than New York City to Pittsburgh.

I’d also never seen a Chrysler Sunbeam. At least not in a museum. It’s the same as a Dodge or Plymouth Omni in the States, only with right-hand drive and tartan upholstery.

Fans of The Big Lebowski should know that Glasgow has a restaurant called Lebowskis. “Not a man – a way of life,” claims the subtitle. (Can restaurants have subtitles?)

 

Thursday in the Highlands

Another short post today, sorry: it’s after midnight again, but I at least I got some more photos up. Take a look (five new photos,link goes to the first one).

The short summary is that we got up late, had breakfast, walked quite a ways to the National/Alamo car rental place, got a Vauxhall Corsa, and drove it up to Fort William and back, and the scenery and roads were incredible. The longer version will include something about me learning to shift gears with my left hand and managing never to drive on the wrong side of the road, even after making a turn. And also how great the intermittent/delay wiper setup is on the Corsa.

 

Wednesday

Five new photos are up on Flickr. No time to write right now, but here’s a link http://www.flickr.com/photos/aduthie/3063416898/in/set-72157609890971960/.

 

Glasgow I

The plan for last night was to ride the Caledonian Sleeper to Glasgow from London Euston (sounds like Houston without the “H”). We paid a bit extra to get a private double berth. It was so small, I couldn’t take a photo of it. While that may be an exaggeration, the bunks really were were wider than the standing space alongside them. It’s tough to manage two full suitcases and two additional bags plus two people in that space, but we did it eventually. The wall between us and the next berth was apparently made of paper; luckily our unseen neighbor didn’t snore.

Glasgow Central Station is much nicer than London Euston, and while it provides places to sit (unlike Euston), it’s also entirely open to the outside air, so it was really cold in there.

We arrived in Glasgow at 7:17am sharp, and since check-in at the hotel was 2pm, we left our bags there and went walking. Most of what catches my eye when travelling abroad has two to four wheels and isn’t for sale in the U.S. I’m sparing you the car photos, but I did spot one thing that I’d seen in London that I thought was interesting: Multi-level construction site offices made of shipping containers. My friend Bryce had discussed various plans involving rehabbing shipping containers as studio space — it seems the construction folks here have refined that into a simple part of their business. (Has anyone seen these in big American cities? Seems like they’d make sense anywhere land is at a premium and there’s lots of new buildings going in.) (Edit: These look wider than shipping containers, so I guess they’re bigger than the four-unit stack we saw near Picadilly Circus in London.)

After a long tea and juice break to hide from the cold and watch Glasgow’s business people start their days, we decided to hunt for a (Scotch) whisky distillery with tours. The nearest one to downtown is a bit too small to offer tours, so we got bus fare out to Glengoyne. It’s about an hour trip, so even though it’s on what amounts to a city bus line, it’s really quite far into the countryside, just across the demarkation from the Lowlands to the Highlands.

We ended up having a private tour with a gent named Arthur, who’d worked regional sales in the food industry before retiring to something less hectic and more enjoyable. He talked us into the “Tasting Tour,” which involves tastes of four of their whiskies, along with a tour of the distillery. He didn’t really have to upsell us too hard on the tasting.

We learned a lot about Scotch that I had forgotten, along with some new insights. Glengoyne is built in an area that lacks peat bogs, so they don’t have the peat as a fuel to dry the barley. You might think that without peat, the Scotch wouldn’t acquire a distinctive taste, but it does — it just doesn’t taste like a peat bog.

After the tour, we walked 10 minutes for lunch at the inn down the road, then walked back to the distillery and arrived just in time for the hourly return bus into Glasgow. A bit more walking and we found the hotel again. Time for a long nap, then a late dinner. Tomorrow is basically unplanned, other than the Ladytron/Asobi Seksu concert in the evening.

 

Enigma

We took a one-hour train to Bletchley Park today to learn about Alan Turing and the Bombe machines that made breaking the codes from Germany’s Enigma machines practical. Polish mathematicians had broken the codes in earlier years; Turing devised a way to speed the process up via a big, incredibly complicated machine that was named Bombe. To wit:

After getting back, we met a writer/editor friend of Peg’s who lives here in London. She took a picture so we could prove that, in fact, we are both here together.

We’re about to get booted from the pub at the station; more tomorrow.

 

It rains in London

Arriving at the hotel at 8:00am meant we didn’t really have a place to stay. We expected this, so we left the bags at the hotel and headed out for the day. It rained rather a lot, although technically it was snow until about 9:00am. We took the tube to the London Bridge station and started walking. As the rain came and went and came and went, eventually it got strong enough to force us to take cover and warm up at the Tate Modern gallery, which is built inside an old power plant.

The largest room/gallery has an enormous installation in it called TH.2058, a sort of mash-up of distopian futures.

We also took a walk around the big Harrod’s department store across the Thames from the Tate. It was very department storish. Compared to, say, Macy’s in NYC’s Midtown, I’d say Harrod’s had much more expensive cars parked around it. Bentleys were a dime a dozen, and we saw a couple Aston Martins, a few Maseratis, and (of course?) a Maybach. The really down-on-their luck shoppers who drove in just had top-of-the-line Range Rovers. (Including one with left hand drive. That made no sense at all, given it had domestic tags.)

After a very long nap at the hotel to try to get our internal clocks reset, we headed out again at 8pm for dinner, then caught the tube to Piccadilly Circus to walk around and see the other tourists lights. We ended up wandering around the Soho district looking for somewhere to stop for a drink. When we turned a particular corner, we were greeted by what gut instinct suggested was an attack of the Stay-Puft marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. Turns out it was just Christmas decor in Soho.