Scotland Day 1

You are in a maze of twisty little streets, all different.

Growing up I played the original Zork. Yup, text-only, "kill thief with sword", "It is dark, you might be eaten by a Grue...". One of the challenging parts of the game was mapping the dungeon. The hardest part of mapping was the maze. Each room simply said "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." Some rooms if you went out, say, the North side you came back into the same room and it didn't even tell you that you were looping. I gave up and cheated - the game included a book of cheats, including a map of the maze. I admit it, I used the map (only of the maze, though). OTHERwise, I beat the game the hard way.

I gave up on Glasgow before I even started. I downloaded a street map to my phone that would allow me to use its GPS to track me around. One way streets in a twisted mess are bad, but surely GPS would trump it? Not so much. The Scots know that silly American tourists come over and expect to be able to navigate with their GPS systems. So they trump them - with randomly dividing streets, and a profusion of no left/right turns signs (plus the odd 'no straight'). One intersection allowed neither a right nor a left turn onto a two-way street! To keep things interesting, either some of the pedestrians are suicidal or they have very good life insurance policies. People cross streets at random and assume cars will stop for them - smack in between two crosswalks, or at one with the 'don't walk' symbol lit. Driving on the left turns out not to be a big deal. Driving at all is the big deal.

After quite a few blocked routes, the odd wrong turn, and nearly killing someone, I did make it to the Barras; a street market held in amongst some antique/curio shops. I had been hoping for more touristy products and less aimed at the locals, but did find a few interesting things. I also picked up some biscuits (semi-sweet cookies, for the uninitiated). Yum. :-)

In the afternoon I once again took steering wheel in hand and braved the maze to visit one of the few remains of the Antonine Wall - the foundations of a Roman bath that was part of the fort at Bearsden. Despite the fact that the Antonine Wall (unlike the more famous and more southerly Hadrian's Wall) was only around for a short time the Romans built typically lasting works. One can still see much of the functional structure (stone ductwork, basically) of the baths. The Romans really knew how to build.