Today was the day to return the hire car and as the closest place to do this to Sue's was in Glasgow we decided to have a day exploring this famous city.

Often thought of as Scotland's 2nd city, for many years it was the powerhouse of manufacturing in Scotland and the largest shipbuilding city in the Commonwealth.

Glasgow is home to some great museums and art galleries, given more time we would have explored some of these in particular the Kelvingrove and Science museums, but as we only had the day we followed our routine of finding the open top tour bus and taking a trip on this. The tour was just over 90mins and like all similar tours allows for hop on hop off, to let you discover more as you wish. Our guide made it very clear there is a great deal of rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh commenting "the only good thing to come out of Edinburgh is the road to Glasgow", reminded us of the Melbourne / Sydney rivalry.

There has been documented occupation of this area of a few thousand years, but Glasgow's heyday was very much in the Victorian era, and most of the architecture of the city is from this era. The buildings are made of Sandstone which has a very high iron content, hence they are very dark in colour, making for a somewhat dismal outlook until you look closer to see the work in the building or decoration. As with most cities which were at their height in the Victorian era there are a great deal of statues to the great and good around the city with most of these being donated by rich individuals of the time. Victorians whilst being "prim and proper in most aspects of their life" liked to display their wealth especially if it was self made.

Down in the old shipbuilding districts, a lot of work is being done to regenerate the city with a lot of new buildings going up, one distinctive facet of the new architecture along the waterfront is the are being built to resemble the ships made on the Clyde.