Rotary Trip to Scotland

It’s noon here in Glasgow, but only 7am back in NC. We left Newark airport at 7:40pm, and landed in Glasgow at 7:30am local time. But that was only 2:30am NC time. Needless to say, we’re all a bit wiped. Adrienne managed to sleep a lot on the plane, the rest of us not so much. We’re all committed to staying up until 9-9:30 tonight so we can get onto a normal schedule tomorrow.

Our departure from Greensboro was fun and friend and family-filled. We even got a “wave” done for us, mostly by my family but with a couple others roped in. Newark was three hours of wishing three hours were past, but we learned more about each other and ate some decent food in the airport shops.
The plane was a giant sardine can, but got us where we were heading. There was an interesting list of possible movies we could have been shown, including “Mission: Impossible III” and “RV”. Of course we got “Duma” - the heartwarming tale of a boy and his cheetah. Really. Although I’m just guessing on the “heartwarming” part, because I didn’t really watch it until the last ten minutes.

It was very cool seeing the sun rise as we flew east and got close to Scotland. We flew over several islands before we hit Scotland proper, but I don’t think I saw Ireland. The approach in to the airport featured lots of open country speckled with little sheep dots, the occassional small town and some impressive mountains - also speckled with little sheep dots.

We were met at the airport by the District Governor Neil Fraser, rotarian Geraldine O’Donnell and our liason Mike Kelly. They shuttled us to Glynhill hotel, a very neat place, with a great breakfast.
We are now settling in to our rooms, and will probably wander off to a local mall to kill time/keep moving/stay awake for the afternoon before having dinner with Neil and Geraldine.

We found WWE wrestling and “Pop Idol” (the original “American Idol” done here in GB) on the TV, and I’ve been watching “Robot Wars” (you know - where people build little remote control robot cars that can smash/cut/pummell opponents robot cars until someone is the winner) with English announcers while I’ve been writing this. And we just saw an update on a cricket match!

Right. I’ll write more when I’ve slept.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 10th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under Jason's trip updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.