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.