The road to Glasgow involved a lot more steps than most of my journeys. I arose before dawn and walked the two blocks to Belfast’s bus station. The place was deserted but some fellow passengers sorted me on the procedure with tickets for the bus to the port. There was a guy who loked like he was moving his goods and chattels to Arberdeen and a mother and daughter off tol Glasgow Aert School for the daughtrer’s interview. When we arrived at the port I got on a ferry to cross the Irish Sea. On this ferry you could check your bags. I was a bit concerned because I hadn’t done the spare undies thing but I decided to take a risk. I figured when there is only one ferry it was pretty hard for it to go the wrong way.
It was a fairly quick trip – about two hours and for most of the time you could see land somewhere. Like the other ferries, this one had a private truck driver’s lounge like the ones you find in the service stations along the Hume. And the Italians and Spaniards could learn something from the Scotts about convenience. When you walk off the ferry, it is less than 100 metres to the train station. And my bag made it with me. It was quite a spectacular arrival into Stranraer Harbour actually – snow had fallen the during the night and the hillsides were blanketed in white. It was the first snow I had seen since Switzerland nearly two weeks ago.
With my Britrail pass validated I hopped on the train to discover that (as with the Irish trains) there was no power outlet. It’s not helping with the blogging. From there I headed through the snow covered lowlands of Scotland, past quite a lot of sheep – the English woolly type with the black faces. (I’m a bovine expert not a sheep expert.) There were plenty of stops along the way. Like Ireland, Scotland seems to have a lot of small villages and many have rail stations like those in the bush in Australia, sometimes just a platform with no other buildings around it. I changed at Ayr for the remainder of the two-hour journey to Glasgow, pulling in just after midday.
