Thats a lot of Ginger!

Today has been fun and exciting to finish off our weeks *staycation*.

We've had tickets to go to the Irn Bru Doors Open for quite a while now. Booked the nearly to the minute the phone line opened all those months ago.
We had the 2pm tour of the factory, museum and also the warehousing facility that are in (What's it called) Cumbernauld.

Firstly we were gowned for the tour as its a live factory running 24/7 then off to an overhead gantry point to oversee the 4 lines running - C1, 2, 3 & 4 [1].
The 4 lines running were 1 purely for glass bottles. 750ml bottles of ginger usually consumed by your local bricky on a building site. This line wasn't running today as glass is in decline and only runs once or twice a week now, but we were told that if it was running you'd have never heard a thing going on with all the glass clattering about the place.

The next line was for the small bottles - 250ml and 500ml bottles. That was running full pelt. Another line was for cans of Irn-Bru. This line runs at 97,000 cans per HOUR. It runs 24/7 and only is turned off for on average 12 hours per week for sterilization and maintenance. If that line goes off for any reason they are in deep doo doo!!

The last line was for the larger 2 litre bottles of Irn Bru. This was the line directly below the gantry and it was very very busy on a run.

It is quite interesting that the lines are all fully automated with very little human interaction with them other than to feed the robots/ machinery component parts (labels & cardboard mainly or to pull malformed items from the lines as they are processed through machines).

Being west for the day and not far from Uddingston it had been loosely planned that we'd drop by Tunnocks. Not for a tour (they are exclusive and at the discretion of Boyd Tunnock MBE himself, but we're on the list!), but for a bit of tea and nostalgia as the cafe on the main street. The rumours that you could smell toasted coconut on the main street appear to be false, or they weren't doing any at 4pm on a Saturday.

Tea, cake and some souvenirs procured we then headed for home, or we did till my mum said she'd take us out for our dinner. This then lead us to head for South Queensferry for a nice dinner out and a walk along the esplanade. SQ is quite pleasant of a Saturday night even more so when you find a new ice cream parlour that serves affagato!

We're now home. Fed and watered and ready for bed. Except that espresso has now kicked in!!!

[1] The "C" only really standing for Cumbernauld