Homeward Bound

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Friday, June 13, finds us heading home. We drove from Glasgow to Heathrow in our rental car (a red MG); we had investigated flying but this seemed like a better idea — far less shuttling about. We got away in good time and were quickly on the motorways heading south. Google tells us this is a 7 hour drive, so you add on a another hour or so for good measure and we're back in London area by the end of day.

While driving in UK cities is nerve wracking (e.g., our trip out to Woking would have been better/quicker/safer via Uber) the motorways are very much like ours. I drove; Kate took some pictures along the way out the window of the car. It's surprising how much green and verdant countryside there is in the UK.

On the way we pass close by Liverpool. We talked about visiting the war time grave of my uncle Walter Dixon in Formby — I have not been there since my first trip to the UK back in 1979. Perhaps next time.

We stayed overnight at the Hyatt Place Airport, as we had on our arrival back a couple of weeks ago. Our Air Canada flight Saturday morning was uneventful getting us to Toronto by early afternoon and then on home to London Ontario.

University of Glasgow

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Kate's KBS conference this year was held, June 9-13, at the University of Glasgow (see 50th KBS 2025 Scotland). We stayed nearby on Partick Bridge Street (Partick is a major street in the West End but there is no bridge on Partick Bridge Street). 

KBS sessions and meetings were held in the James McCune Smith Learning Hub — a bit of modern Brutalism surrounded by the classic architecture of the old university. And by "old" I mean really old; apparently the university was founded by a papal bull in 1451 ... the same year Columbus was born! Take that Harvard.

Often times Kate and I would take an Uber to the conference and I'd go exploring the area. Just up the hill are the gates to the old University with the new Library and the Macdonald/Mackintosh House of the Hunterian Gallery across the road. There are some pictures of the Hunterian Museum and the Cloisters in the photo album; that's in the old part — the Gilbert Scott Building. 

There's two courtyards to the Gilbert Scott Building with the Cloisters in between. There 's plaque on a wall there to James McGill who was an alumni and founded University of McGill in Montreal (where Kate did her first undergraduate years).

There is a chapel at the one end of the building very near the Lion and Unicorn staircase (1690). There's another plaque on a nearby building to Lord Kelvin (a peerage title, his real name was William Thomson) and a building named after him. The Kelvin River is a green space to the south side of the University; I walked down there to find my way to the Kelvingrove Gallery and Museum.

Kelvingrove Museum & Art Gallery

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The Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery is a short walk from our AirBnB in the West End of Glasgow. Entry is free and we went several times including the Thursday night KBS Banquet. I went at least once on my own for a lunch time organ recital.

The Kelvin river flows from above the Botanic Gardens, down through green space that includes the Kelvingrove, past our AirBnB and out to the Clyde. Lord Kelvin was a Mathematician and Physicist at the University Glasgow in the late 1800's. I'm not sure if the river is named after him — likewise for the Kelvin temperature. 

Kelvingrove is both a museum and an art gallery with lots to see. It's a turn of the last century red brick building with lots of curlicue, towers, columns and fussy details. You enter into an impressively large two story hall with a grand pipe organ at the end. This is where we had the banquet and where I attended the organ recital. To the left and right are two story wings with smaller, but grand, two story halls down the centre.

The one grand hall, to the west, is more like a museum with a large stuffed elephant and a hanging WWI ear spitfire airplane. There are exhibits of armour from days of old.

The other grand hall, to the east, is more like a gallery with lots of statuary and many heads hanging on thin lines. Lots of interesting artwork.

One small darkened "chapel" has a large Salvador Dali painting ("Christ of Saint John of the Cross" 1951). Not quite as impressive as that huge Dali, "Santiago El Grande" 1957, that we saw at the Beaverbrook (see Fredericton, NB, 2024).

We both are very much interested in the various schools of art that developed in Glasgow. Especially the "Glasgow Style" of Macdonald/Mackintosh.

Glasgow, West End

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We were in Glasgow (Scotland, west side on the River Clyde) for Kate's KBS conference. We stayed in an AirBnB apartment in the "West End". This seemed to be a rather bohemian part of the city and close to the university where the conference was held.

The photo album has some pictures of the area — mostly street scenes captured as I wandered about. Other albums will focus on particular areas, museums, galleries, etc.

We used Uber a lot to get back and forth to the conference. I did some walk about wandering. On the Wednesday we rented a car to go to Loch Lomond with Sam and to return to London on the Friday.

Loch Lomond

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The Wednesday of the KBS 2025 Glasgow conference has afternoon "Social Events" — trips to explore Glasgow and the area. There are a number of choices; some involve walking around the old city which we cannot do; another involves a bus trip to explore Loch Lomond (the largest fresh water lake in the UK). We are late to get our act together and the Loch Lomond trip, which we might have picked, is fully booked so alternate plans are required.

We have been exploring how best to get back to Heathrow for our flight out Saturday and have decided that we should rent a car instead of flying or taking a train (all the shuffling back and forth to the two airports would be impossible). I pick the rental up in the morning, a red MG CRV kind of car, and we have that afternoon to explore the countryside ourselves. Kate's friend Sam from ARF/CAMH comes with us. Sam took the picture of Kate and me canoeing on Loch Lomond. We used that picture for our 45th anniversary invitations and ads in the local paper.

From our AirBnB on Partick Bridge in Glasgow's west end it's an easy 40 minute drive on the A82 to the picturesque conservation village of Luss on Loch Lomond a little to the west and north of the city. We're aiming for lunch at Colquhoun's Loch Lomond Restaurant just a little outside of Luss with views of the Loch. Kate has investigated and it looks like a nice place to have lunch; good views and good food.

Google maps, which I rely on, lets us down. We drive past the village of Luss and end up in the village of Tarbet which is several miles to the north (about 8 miles, 10 minutes past Luss). This gives us a pleasant drive along the Loch — a long narrow lake (perhaps 30 miles). However, we recognize we've been led astray and Google leads us back to the restaurant. There's a lodge and spa, it's a quiet private retreat on the Loch.

We enjoy our lunch together and take a few pics on their floating boat pier/dock. There are pleasure boats and tour boats wandering past. And very aggressive swans that assume we will feed them and, if not, they're out to take a bite out of us!

The lake is at it's widest here with an archipelago of several very small islands. Just a short walk along the beach to the south of us is a public park and beach. You can't get there from here, there's a fence to make the beach at this hotel, restaurant and spa private. We drive to the public beach to find the Loch Lomond Leisure - Luss Beach kayak and canoe rental. We rent a canoe for an hour; we're all handy that way and explore the archipelago. It's an easy canoe trip, the lake isn't very big, the water is calm and there isn't a lot of boat traffic to get in the way.

The village of Luss is beside us, we didn't explore the village, and there's a pier there for tour boats that take punters like us on a tour of the lake. We wonder if any of our KBS colleagues are taking a boat from here (or perhaps from Tarbet where we were led astray). The water is warm, people are swimming, and brave young folks are jumping off the pier into the water. There are campers in nearby campgrounds. A beautiful day to explore the lake.

We had a pleasant day exploring the Loch. The drive up has revealed Blake's "green and pleasant land" (the poem "Milton") far removed from the hustle and bustle of the cities. I'm constantly amazed at the quiet pristine landscapes to be found in the UK.

Macdonald/Mackintosh House

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On Tuesday, after dropping Kate off for her conference (at the James McCune Smith Learning Hub) I continued on up the hill to visit the Hunterian Art Gallery — a modern building by the University Library and across the street from the old University Gates. I'm most interested in the recreation of the Macdonald/Mackintosh house.

The gallery has a collection that shows the development of various styles from traditional landscapes through to impressionism, art nouveau (e.g., they have a Mucha print), art deco, craftsmen (think Franklin Lloyd Wright) and on to the modern art of today

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh were a famous art nouveaux/art deco/craftsmen era couple who built a home here — he the artist and he the architect. The home is long gone replaced by these brutalism buildings housing the University Library and the Hunterian Gallery. The gallery has quite a collection of artworks but I'm most interested in the works by Scottish artist and designer . The Mackintosh House is a faithful recreation of the interior of the their home and every bit of the home is/was a unique piece of art.

They have a yellowed sketch of her work, 'The Birth and Death of the Winds' (with her sister Frances), is especially creepy but representative of her style — weirdly gaunt emaciated nudes. The sketch was made into a folding screen but the gallery just has the yellowed paper sketch. We bumped into more of her work at the Kelvingrove gallery. I have an photo album of her work I cribbed from a Facebook page (see my Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh collection but see also Wikipedia collection at Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh).

There are many things to see in Glasgow; I enjoyed her pieces and the recreation of their home at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow. It's one of the joys of traveling with Kate to these KBS conferences.

See also Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (on Facebook).

Botanic Gardens

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On Monday, after dropping off Kate at the university I continue wandering city streets north to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. There's quite a bit of green space here with a large glass green house — the Kibble Palace. Like all the museums and galleries around the city, entry is free.

The green house is impressive; but so too are the marble statuary within. The plants are interesting too of course.

Afterwards I continue north in the gardens looking for the Kirklee Bridge (largely obstructed by vegetation) over the Kelvin River; I follow the paths along the river back downstream and ascend stairs back into the Botanic Gardens.

Clydeside Distillery

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Sunday Kate and I visit the Clydeside Distillery with our chum Sam who is also at the KBS 2025 Glasgow conference. She and Al have been touring around Scotland for the last week; Al has already headed home. 

We had a friend who had been to Glasgow recently who recommended that we should visit this new distillery. I gather it's the only one is Glasgow although there have been many in the past. There are tours one might take; but Kate and I have seen many distilleries over the year. We don't need to do that again. 

Our friend was keen on the restaurant where one could have some food and a whisky tasting. Hmm.... when we got there they were rethinking the restaurant — the room was there for tastings only.

A note on spelling. They write it as "whisky" (same in Canada); I sometimes write it as "whiskey" (like the Irish and Americans do). It tastes the same no matter how you spell it.

The location is on the north shore just a short distance up the Clyde from the Glasgow's Riverside Museum (Sam and Al had visited there earlier). The whole area is a redeveloped shipyard. Apparently this building was originally the pump house that operated the gates to the once thriving Queen's dock. In the song "I wish I was in Glasgow" (Billy Connolly) there's the lines about "We'd talk about the old days and the shipyard's sad decline". These days the area is quite spiffy but there remain some vacant yards, abandoned piers and the like. The distillery was opened in 2017 (see the Clydeside History). I assume that much of what they serve has come from other places. Whisky is aged; 2107 isn't that long ago. 

We tasted some whisky; or at least I tasted some whisky — the ladies aren't into hard liquor. I had a flight with a bit of water and an eye dropper to dilute my drinks to my taste. It was nice whisky, much like the blends I drink as every day scotch. There's none of that nasty Islay style which, I think, people only buy because nobody else will drink it.

As you can see from the selfie above, our server was a great ham!

Riverside Museum

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The Transportation Museum (aka the Riverside Museum) is on the north bank of the Clyde River here in Glasgow. It's not far from our AirBnB in the West End; we take an Uber over on Saturday and spend several hours visiting the galleries. Like most museums and galleries run the by city, entry is free! Although you are encouraged to make a donation.

This area along the Clyde would have been the docklands — a port and shipbuilding center. All of that is gone; replaced with modern structures like this museum.

There's quite a bit of transportation history crammed into this museum. There's a steam engine (a big steam engine!), trams and buses, old cars and motorcycles, even horse drawn carriages. Glasgow, and the shipyards along the Clyde (long gone), made this an important port for immigration out to places like Canada, Australia, and the rest of the commonwealth. The Queen Mary (1933) was an important steam ship launched from here.

There's a lovely tall ship moored here, the Glennlee, There are some pictures at the end of the album taken from the Clyde Distillery (Scotch Wiskey) which is only a little ways up (east) the river.

There's a couple of interesting tram stories. One, there was a time when women started to work the trams (because the men were away to war). Oddly, they handled that fine. Two, there's the story about the spread of TB through spitting. Life was tough, spitting made it tougher. Many died.

There's a nice restaurant here but it's pretty busy; we have a late lunch. I have a "Haggis Sandwich". Haggis is that Scottish treat of oatmeal, offal and spices boiled in a sheep's stomach. The sandwich is an unusual way to serve it. Usually it's served as Haggis & Neeps (turnips).

Berlin

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Thursday, June 5 we're off from Dresden to the Berlin Airport where we'll stay overnight and fly out the next day for Glasgow. Chris, our No. 1 son, has a meeting in Berlin and has kindly agreed to drive us. It's about a 2hr drive on the A13. We had arranged a bus service, that would go directly to the airport, but it's far nicer to be chauffeured. It's also an opportunity to spend more time with Chris.

Chris has a Volkswagen electric car; a company car. It's modern, new, fast and a comfortable ride on the motorway to Berlin. Chris demonstrates how fast the car will cruise on roads where there is no speed limit. I recall riding with Martin around Frankfurt/Nierstein and him demonstrating the same. 

We arrive at the airport around noon, Chris heads off to his meeting and we drop our luggage at the IntercityHotel Berlin Airport. It's too early to check in but they stow our bags awa. Kate persuades me that we ought to take the train into the city center and see some of the sights.

Kate has been to Berlin several times over the years to GENACIS meetings. I had always refused to go — work and winter travel got in the way. She has fond memories of the city and thinks I ought to see some of it while we're here. There's also a scheduled KBS in 2027 so we might be back.

We find our way to the underground train station (Flughafen BER) and struggle with the ticketing machine. We get some help from some UK travellers and we all have a chuckle, after getting our tickets, to discover that there's an option on the screen to set the language! And of course nobody looks at our tickets getting on, off or during the 20-30 minute ride there and back. I guess it's really just an honor system.

At the Berlin Central Station (Berlin Hauptbahnhof) we find a cafe on the square (Washington Platz) for Kate to hunker down and wait for me as I explore the city with the Brandenberg Gates as my destination. Around the train station, and across the river, there's lots of very modern archictecture with the occasional bit that survived the war and/or has been rebuilt after the war. There's also quite a bit of green space and many government buildings.

It's a reasonable walk I have planned; about 20 minutes or so each way. I pass by Capitol Beach on the Spree River where beach chairs line the water and folks soak up the sun (there's no beach proper); there are largeish boats cruising the river; the Reichstag Building (Reichstagsgebäude, the German Parliament) is an impressive older turn of the century building (where the Nazis used the 1933 Reichstag Fire to stage their coup); and likewise the Brandenberg Gates is also a turn of the century structure.

Nearby is a monument to the Jews killed by the Nazis in WWII. It's a park of about a city blook that looks like a unadorned graveyard of tightly packed simple bare mausoleums. Quite impressive. On the way wandering back I bump into a Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism. That's in the Tiergarten across from the Brandenburg gates. These gardens are quite wooded with quiet lanes to wander. I bump into a statue to Goethe (1749–1832 what do I know about German literature) and another of a lioness that has been killed, while the male lion stands over her protecting her body and baby cubs wrapped around her.

Back at the airport, we get checked into our hotel and have a dinner with Chris before he heads back to Dresden. We fly out to Glasgow tomorrow.

It was a real treat to visit Chris, Amy and their children in Dresden. We hope to see them again, they are kind generous family for us.

Dresden

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We did a bit of jaunt around England and Germany before Kate's KBS conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

After our visit with Martin and Tina in Oppenheim we took a direct train from Frankfurt to Dresden, in the former East Germany, where our No. 1 son Chris (Martin's son), his wife Amy, and their three kids (Charlotte, Sebastian and Emily) live. Chris picked us up at the train station (he also drove us to Berlin airport at the end of our visit). We stayed in a nearby hotel.

On the first night we had a BBQ outdoors at their home which looks over nearby vineyards on the hillside above them. This was also Charlotte's 8th birthday. We had last seen her when she was just a newborn in Nottingham (see notes on Sheffield, 2017). The children were a little shy but we soon made friends. Sebastian reminds us so much of the impish but fun child Chris was when we first met all those years ago in Nierstein, 1994.

On the Wednesday Chris and Amy took us into Dresden to see the Neumarket town square which has been restored. The kids were off to a nearby school. You may know that Dresden was fire-bombed (February 1945) during WWII; a terrible act of war on a civilian population that today would/should count as a war crime. The horror of it all is memorialized in Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969). I recall reading the book many years ago.

When East and West Germany were reunited (1989-90) a lot of money from the west was used to restore Dresden to it's past and current glory. The Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), an iconic Lutheran church in the Neumarkt square, is famously restored -- it was an international effort (1994-2005). It had been completely destroyed in the fire-bombing of 1945, left as a pile of rubble and a memorial to war (and evil of the west) during the communist years. You can see the stained old stones against the new. These days it's a memorial to the reconciliation of the two warring sides.

We shared an Italian lunch on the Neumarkt square and tromped around a bit. The square is huge and there's lots to see. There's a grand opera house, lots of statuary and fine buildings. Were we younger we would have enjoyed wandering around this part of the city. It's obvious that it was an important and rich powerhouse before the wars. It's pedestrian friendly with lots to see including a river, the Elbe, running through it.

Kate wrote a note to Chris and Amy describing our long standing relationship:

"I'm just going through our pictures from Germany and Glasgow and looking at some of the pictures of our visit with your family and it came into my mind — how did we get so lucky to have Christopher for a friend? And then through you, we get to spend time with Amy and your wonderful children. The pictures reminded me what a lovely time we had with you and how much fun your kids were (they seemed to really fancy Reg)."

We hope to see our Dresden family again on this, or that, side of the big pond while we still can.

Ps. the lovely photo of Kate with the Frauenkirche above was taken by Amy.