Scotland has a way of rewriting your plans while making you grateful it did. This four-part series follows Melissa and me—empty-nesters with hiking boots permanently packed—on our first Newarizons Scotland road trip.
We flew out of Tulsa with a map full of maybes and one hard decision already made: we were going to drive Scotland.
Melissa and I had spent weeks circling the same argument. Train tickets looked tidy—no left-side nerves, no rental-car anxiety—but they also meant rolling past every roadside castle, every misty pull-off, every chance to stop when something caught our eye. Melissa finally said what we both already knew: if this was our first time, we needed the car. She would book the stays and stack the days. I would drive the whole loop—right-hand seat, left-side of the road—like a man who suddenly remembered he’d never done that before, while I still hunted the trails between hotel pins.
Landing in Edinburgh, picking up the rental, and pulling into oncoming traffic “a handful of times” is a story I tell with more humor now than I felt in the moment. The locals looked more panicked than I did. Fair enough. In the States you drive on the right and sit on the left; in Scotland it’s the reverse, and your brain needs a few miles to stop arguing with your hands. It got better. It always does if you keep going.
Our first afternoon was pure *Outlander* fuel. We’d come for hiking and country, but we’d also come for castles—especially the ones we’d only known from a screen. Blackness Castle came first, and we arrived uncomfortably close to closing. Fifteen minutes, maybe. We rushed floors and stairways and little nooks we would’ve lingered in for hours on a slower day. Not optimal. Still beautiful. Still worth the scramble for the photos and the feel of stone under damp air.
Then Midhope Castle—Lallybroch on the show. You can’t go inside, so we walked the path, took pictures of the exterior, and noticed what television never shows you: other buildings, the real edges of the place, and a run of wild pheasants that made us both laugh. In Oklahoma you don’t see pheasants casually in daylight unless you’re far out on prairie country. Here they just… were. Running free on the approach to a castle we’d watched on a couch half a world away.
Scotland that trip was cool and a little damp—the kind of weather that spit drizzle more than it poured. We’d packed rain jackets and windbreakers on purpose. The mood matched the land.
By evening we pointed north to Perth and checked into the Royal George Hotel. Not a chain. Not the Ritz. A smaller-city stay by the river that sounded right when Melissa found it—and it was. The room had that layered, older character you can’t fake. The catch? No elevator. If you’re not on the ground floor, you carry your bags up an old wooden spiral staircase that creaks like it’s narrating your arrival. One of the quiet thrills of travel: sleeping in a hotel that may well be older than the United States, then sleeping well anyway.
Morning brought our first full Scottish breakfast. Black pudding, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, hash browns, rashers, toast, beans—and yes, beans on toast, which no American brain files under “breakfast” until you watch locals choose it with everything else available. I tried it. It was good enough that I’ve eyed the Heinz beans at World Market back in Tulsa more than once. I also tried the haggis, nervous and curious in equal measure. Surprise: I liked it. Went back for seconds and skipped the black pudding on round two. Melissa kept her plate closer to home—eggs, bacon, fruit, toast. No tomatoes, no mushrooms, and definitely no blood pudding or haggis. Different forks, same sunny breakfast room, vitamin D before the next stretch of road.
We hadn’t planned to explore Perth. It was a one-night pin on the map. But we love architecture and unfamiliar streets, so we walked the river, photographed cobblestones and buildings we don’t see every day, then hauled the bags back down that creaky spiral one last time.
Edinburgh behind us. Perth in the rearview. Highlands ahead—and somewhere out there, we hoped, the Highland coos Melissa had been waiting to meet.
*Part 1 of 4 — Scotland Road Trip. Next: Highlands to Loch Ness.*
