The GCW Tour, A Few Bits of the UK and Ireland: What Are They Smoking at the Scottish Museum Curator's Conventions?

So our next stop was at the award-winning(?!?!) Riverside Museum, Scotland's Museum of Transport and Travel. Let's take a look, shall we?...

Now, I'm a reasonably tall guy, but even I can't catch much detail of a motorcycle stuck on the fourth shelf, twenty feet in the air, or a bicycle mounted to a donut hanging from the ceiling. We could not for the life of us figure out what the point of these displays were, other than creating a place for families to bring their kids.

Then there was the section devoted to a recreation of one of Glasgow's main streets circa 1930. Interesting and educational -- who knew how essential a pawn shop was to many families survival? -- but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it had to do with transport or travel...

But I did learn one transportation related thing: Glasgow's subway ran in one direction around the city. It moved by virtue of a cable that moved constantly. The car's had a mechanism whereby the conductor could have the car grab on to the cable to move, or let go of the cable to slow down and stop. And because it only moved in one direction, everyone boarded from the same side, so they only had to paint the left side of the cars. 

The other display I sort of liked was this one...

It was devoted to "Scottish adventurers": Mark Beaumont, who cycled from Anchorage to Ushuaia; Andy Brown, who cycled from Sydney to Valparaiso; Karen Darke, who turned her hand-crank cycle all the way across the Himalayas; Ewan McGregor (yes, that Ewan McGregor), who rode one of the motorcycles from London to New York by way of Mongolia, and the other from Scotland to South Africa; and Kate Rawles, who rode her bike from Alaska to New Mexico.

Impressive.

The museum, I have to say, was less so (even with a tall ship in the backyard)...

Thrown by the Riverside Museum,we decided to end the day with something more traditional at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum...

Uh huh. Not so much.

We were greeted by Elvis...

Then went to see the African animals getting strafed by a Spitfire...

We saw dinosaur skeletons standing next to a tiny model of the great woolly mammoth...

And works of art interrupted with displays of historical firearms...

I have to admit: I just do not see in the logic in the layout of a Scottish museum. But I liked this little educational bit on art conservation...

And, of course, I appreciated that I got to add another dead body to my collection...