Glasgow: The Return. This time we mean business!

For the weekend Dec 4-6th, we did an epic road trip to Glasgow, Scotland with a couple of our vegan friends (12yearsavegan and The Vegan Engineer aka Deadpan Vegan) from Birmingham.

They picked us up around 4pm Friday and we made our 5 hour journey through England and into Scotland. We had looked into train tickets for the 4 of us and it was super expensive! In fact every time we check trains to Scotland they are always really expensive. This is why we decided to rent a car. Between the 4 of us, it ended up being a 1/3rd of the price of train tickets. Plus we had the added luxury and convenience of travelling by car.

Our fancy rental car for the weekend.

For this stay, we got ourselves an Airbnb. Check in was a little difficult, as the owner wanted more money for an evening check in than a daytime check in. (Even though it wasn't stated in his ad that you couldn't check in later) He complained to Airbnb about us wanting to check in late and not wanting to pay extra. Airbnb handled the dispute by giving the host money to pay for late check in and we were refunded £20 for the inconvenience caused from this host.

Once that was all sorted check in was easy, the caretaker came to let us in, and she met us in the parking lot. She was there at our expected arrival.

Both of us Wanderlust Vegans have been to Glasgow before back in 2011 on a family road trip across Scotland. We didn't get to spend much time in Glasgow last time. We only had enough time to find our guest house, go to the Vegan Cafe/Pub called the 78, then a bar that used to be a church near our guest house, then sleep for a little bit and leave for Canada. We've been looking forward to coming back to Glasgow since then.

On the drive up, we listened to Taylor Swift and told jokes. 5 hours really didn't seem so long. We made it to our airbnb around 1030pm. The caretaker let us in and showed us around. We rented out an entire flat with 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. The light in the main bathroom didn't work, so we were refunded some money for the inconvenience. The flat itself was alright. It wasn't the fanciest of places but it was clean. The first night we just hung out at the flat having some drinks and talking. We were all quite tired from the drive up. We also wanted to get an early start for Vegfest in the morning.

The next day we made our way to Vegfest. We thought it was a 5 minute walk, but it ended up being 30 mins, so we drove and parked. Plus it was super windy and rainy. It was humorous watching people attempting to use umbrellas. The windy was turning everyone's umbrellas inside out. Vegfest was at SECC, which was a beautiful venue.

 There was a lot of great stalls and interesting speakers as well.

 We looked around, then found some food for breakfast. We had Veg 'Sos' rolls. They were quite good and hit the spot. Then we went and watched a talk on health. ie. Benefits of a vegan diet against diabetes, dementia, cancers and other diseases with Dr.Tushar Mehta MD. He was from Toronto, Canada! We thought he sounded Canadian when he started his talk and then he confirmed it. You can watch one of his talks on nutritional practice:

 After his talk we walked around again, watched some bands and got some more food.

Caribbean food bowl from Soya Jerk.

 We got a Caribbean food bowl from Soya Jerk. It was amazing, and filled us both up! Then we went and got a bubble tea before the next talk we wanted to see.

The next talk we saw was How Not To Promote Veganism by Vegan Lass. The speaker took an abolitionist approach to promoting veganism arguing that campaigns saving one type of animal are bad, promoting lacto-ovo vegetarianism is bad, promoting meat reduction like meat free Mondays is bad, promoting veganism for health reasons is bad and using sex to sell veganism is bad. She made some interesting points about how these tactics distract from the overall issue of stopping all animal suffering but we don't think they are as harmful as she seemed to think they are. Based on our experience people go vegan different ways and people go vegan for different reasons but then stay vegan for compassionate reasons. What do you think?

After the talk we walked around eating free samples, got some ice cream and bought some vegan t-shirts!

 Around 4pm, some of the booths began to shut down and we were getting tired, so we left Vegfest. It was still really windy and rainy.

Outiside SECC

 We drove to the nearest Co-op store and bought some snacks, and beer. We went back to our flat and relaxed for a couple hours.

This is the only picture of the flat we got. 

 That evening we went to one of my facebook friend's house. She owns the vegan bakery Smashing Tarts in Glasgow. She was kind enough to invite us into her home for Nachos, Cupcakes and White Russians. It was amazing. We hung out with her, her husband and her neighbor.

They also had three of the cutest dogs, we seem to only have pictures of two of them though.

We enjoyed our time at their place and hopefully we will be able to visit them again soon!

We left her place around 1130pm because we wanted to check out one of Glasgow's many vegan pubs. We made our way to Stereo and had some drinks

 We left Stereo around 230am and headed back to our flat.

City Centre at 230am

 The next morning we got a bit of a late start. We left our airbnb about noon and parked the car in a free parking lot. We walked the rest of the way to Vegfest

 We started walking along the river.

 It was such a beautiful change from yesterdays weather. 

 We walked along the water until I spotted a snowman. Unfortunately, part of the walkway was blocked off due to private property so we had to find another way to walk.

 We continued to walk, and kept running into fences and would have to find our way around again.

HUGE puddle!

 We found our way back to the water, but did get yelled at by a scotswoman for jumping a fence. We were trapped, we could not find the way out!

 We took the bridge across River Clyde and finally were on our way to Vegfest.

Our walk back to VegFest took about 45 minutes, which is much longer than it should have taken.

 A lot of people showed up for day 2, which is wonderful to see. We went on search for food.

Korean Raw wrap.

 After we ate, we went to see a talk by Dr. Melanie Joy. She is an author of one of my favourite vegan books. "Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows".

Her talk was so good. She's a wonderful speaker. To find more about her campaign click here.

We couldn't find the talk she did at Vegfest, but we found a really good talk that she's done at another event and posted it below for those of you who want to watch. The talk is called: "Melanie Joy - Carnism: The Psychology of Eating Meat"

 After her talk, I spotted my friend from Scotland who we met in Canada while she was living there on a working visa. We had planned to meet up at Vegfest as we hadn't seen each other since 2011. It was so great catching up and walking around Vegfest. We were able to visit for a couple hours before her and her boyfriend's train home.

We then got some food from the stall run by the many vegan pubs in Glasgow; the 78, Stereo, Mono, 13th note, and the Flying duck. Since it was the end of the fest all of their items were 2 for 1. We got 2 seitan burgers, 2 mushroom pasties, a cheese and onion pasty and a spinach pie. Score! We were sufficiently suffonsified you might say. We watched the band while we ate before we headed back to Birmingham.

 We left Vegfest and walked back to the car

River Clyde

 It was easier to find our way back to the car since the scotswoman who yelled at us told us how to get back to where we were without jumping the fence.

We found the car and had another 5 hour journey ahead of us. The drive back was just as fast as the drive there. We also stopped once. The four of us got on really well, and the weekend was really good. We plan to travel again with these guys. Everything about the weekend was amazing and we are so happy to have spent the weekend with so many wonderful people.


Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post and want to see more from VegFestUK, check out our post on "...down to Brighton Vegfest! yo!"