When I was in college, I had an ex-boyfriend who flew to Scotland as revenge for my breaking up with him. He took a girl he’d recently hooked up with, and the two of them maxed out a couple of MasterCards he had no intention of paying.
Honestly, I don’t remember expressing any desire to see Scotland, so I’m not sure how sabotaging his own credit and ending up with whatever burning pestilence he picked up from his new partner ranks in terms of all-time acts of “so there, neener neener,” but I do wonder if he still thinks of me every time he looks up his credit score.
Which I suppose is a weird way to introduce you to our recent trip to Scotland, but probably also explains why, when people ask, “why Scotland?” I feel like muttering “vengeance” in a Batman voice.
The good news is, we didn’t max out our credit, and I’m certain no one came back with anything but normal souvenirs.
It’s a weird time to travel internationally, given the entitled toddler and his clown car of a cabinet we’ve installed as leaders of the free world. It does add a little spice to the journey to be in an airplane over the Atlantic when the POTUS threatens World War Three. But we’d found cheap tickets to Inverness last fall, and a plan is a plan.
The real answer to “why Scotland” is soccer. Or football, as they call it across the way. About a year ago, Mike’s socials served up a WeFunder opportunity for a Scottish football team, and Mike, being, well Mike, was all “why would we do anything but opt into a share of a Scottish football team?”
Which is how he, along with about nine thousand others, became part owners of the Caledonian Braves, and how now, instead of watching Ryan Reynolds and that other guy who looks like a shorter version of him on Netflix, we’re getting up early on Saturday mornings to stream games live from the UK.
I’m not much into sports. But it’s become a soothing start to my weekends to wake to the brogue of Scottish football announcers on Saturday mornings, and if Mike’s going to have a new obsession, this is way more fun for me than the stock car racing thing he took up in our twenties.
At the time Mike booked the Inverness tickets, we knew we wouldn’t have much time for vacationing, so this trip was short enough that full 40% of it was travel, but we figured it was worth it. We arrived in the teensiest airport on a windy April afternoon and took a three-hour train ride through the Scottish Highlands to Stirling.
Our Stirling cab driver immediately commented on our accents, which touched off a hearty conversation about our absolute twat of a president and whether we as Americans should be worried about being targeted by some lunatic with a bone to pick over gas prices.
The driver promised not to share our hotel location with any such folk, which would have sounded way more threatening had it not been delivered with such a hearty laugh, and were we not on our 30th consecutive hour of no sleep. We dropped off our luggage and then set off to watch the Braves win a pickup match against a Stirling team.
Mike gave a little on-camera commentary about how wonderful it was to be among the half dozen or so people in the stands for the game and I think he did a great job, especially for someone who’d at that point been awake for a day and a half and maybe (or maybe not) had also received a low-key death threat from a cabbie.
The next day, after the best eight hours of unconsciousness that anyone’s ever had (at least on my part), we set off to climb the 200+ stairs at the William Wallace National Monument.
Next was Stirling Castle, and I’m sorry. I must have been in such a state of awe at seeing the childhood home of Mary Queen of Scots that I got exactly zero photos of the outside, but the inside was stunning, and I’ll include a photo looking down into the courtyard. You can see the Monument off in the distance.
From there, we took a train to Glasgow, which I was expecting to feel way more industrial than it did, probably because everyone told me to expect Glasgow to feel, well … industrial. I suppose Glasgow did its level best to give that impression, but it’s hard to do with all the cobblestones and medieval cathedrals and public art.
I loved all of Glasgow, but my favorite was the Necropolis, which sits ominously above the Glasgow Cathedral, overlooking the town like it’s daring you to turn your back on it. Even given the gorgeous morning of our visit, it was delightfully spooky.
There’s a statue in the middle of Glasgow of the Duke of Wellington on a horse. At some point, a couple of decades ago, a traffic cone showed up on the Duke’s head, which, considering his height, was probably kind of dangerous to place. City officials removed the cone, over and over again, but it reappeared every night.
Finally, in a win for hooligans (and traffic cones, probably), the city gave up and declared the cone official Duke attire, and now the Duke with his traffic cone hat is an unofficial symbol of Glasgow.
This story kind of feels like a metaphor for parenting and also makes me love Glasgow even more.
After three days in the city, our Braves winning another match, and a dinner with the other eighty or so team owners who’d assembled for the weekend, we took another train to Edinburgh.
If Glasgow is edgy and industrial, Edinburgh is hoity-toity, with shops full of tchotchkes and mobs of tourists. We toured the Edinburgh Castle and shopped the Royal Mile, then hopped on one of those on-and-off buses to take in more of the city than we could on foot.
A couple additional points of interest, that didn’t necessarily fit anywhere else in this post:
- We had way better weather in Scotland than we had any right to expect, which is what happens when you spend good money on rain gear. I could have guaranteed torrential rain all week had I just taken one of our broke-ass Idaho umbrellas. You’re welcome, fellow tourists.
- Everywhere we went, if Mike had the opportunity to engage anyone in any non-political conversation, he asked about their favorite football team and how they came about deciding it was their favorite. Every time, the answer was something along the lines of “it’s the team my Da loves,” or “it’s a family thing. There was never really any choice.”
- Also, there’s a guy on the Braves team whose name is Connor McLaren, and when I hear the Scottish announcer say it, it sounds a lot like “Connor MacLeod” as in “Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod,” and I want to yell “there can be only one!” but Mike tells me this is more dorky than profound, and he’s almost always right about such things. Please tell me if you think he’s wrong, so I can rub it in his face.
- If you don’t get the reference, please brush up on your eighties movie trivia so we can remain friends.
