Scotland Part 2: (London) Edinburgh and Aberdeenshire

“I’ll still be drunk by the time we hit London,” I said, still firmly ensconced in a very comfortable puffy chair in the Newark airport Polaris lounge. The culprit was a very nice older woman who seemingly had no idea how much Scotch was appropriate for a single serving, and had thus taken a cocktail glass and filled it solidly halfway with Glenmorangie Nectar D’Or. God bless her willingness to get no more than five servings out of a typical Scotch bottle.

Sober enough to board the flight, tipsy enough to be glad our first class seats had no neighbors to annoy, London was just a few hours away. Our vacation had officially begun.

I remained worried about Heathrow. Not just because everyone in the world who heard us mentioning it popped up with some tale about how it was the worst airport in the world, impossible to navigate in either direction, and potentially a direct portal into the fourth circle of hell. Not just because airport staff had spent all summer cancelling flights into and out of the airport due to an inability to manage the number of flights, baggage, and people they had previously allowed to book flights into and out of the airport. But also because I knew it was a demarcation line, and therefore had this perception of the specific place and time where everything could go right or wrong, setting the tone and tenor of the rest of the trip. As I mentioned before, so much of this trip had felt cursed, and I had spent much of July and August with a low to medium level of anxiety surrounding all manner of details small and large.

We knew what we wanted to do (again…) because early in the planning stages (the first time) we put together a small list of “must-do”s for each of us, and we’d spent a fair amount of time (the fourth time) organizing our trip to ensure we each got to hit as many of them as possible.

Chief amongst my must-dos was to visit Castle Fraser - both for me and for my mom - Oban distillery (my favorite Scotch), and to get a proper kilt made. For Beth, it was the Isle of Skye, Inverness, and her favorite distillery: Clynelish. We both wanted to see Edinburgh, and we’d discovered that Glenturret had what was purported to be an excellent restaurant with reservation availability on my actual birthday. So with a little planning, some slight re-planning, a tense moment or two, throwing it all away and starting over, and then realizing that the slightly replanned plans were the optimal plans after all, we had our schedule.

But that left a few small questions: how do we get to Edinburgh in the first place?

The problem was that flights directly from LAX to Edinburgh were going to cost the entirety of my net worth plus several other rather successful people’s retirement accounts. So we started looking at other airports. Manchester. Dublin. Cork. (Not really.) In the end, London emerged as the best combination of cost, convenience, and a low likelihood of general trip disruption.

What kind of general trip disruption were we concerned with? Well, on our trip to Italy, we nearly ended up booking our flights back from Barcelona instead of Rome. And while it would have been lovely to finally see Barcelona, the exact day we were set to return was the day Catalan Independence protests shut down the entire city and burned part of the airport to the ground. Instead, we watched the news reports on Barcelona from a waiting area in Rome.

So we’re probably a little more cautious than most about the degree to which we’ll compromise on price and convenience to ensure a lower likelihood of disruption or immolation. But it’s Heathrow, right? One of the biggest and moist stable airports in the world - they’re not just gonna start cancelling flights willy nilly, right?

So when Heathrow started cancelling flights willy nilly in the summer leading up to our trip, it suddenly started gaining this … weight. Significance. It became, if not a fixation point, then at the very least an outsized object of focus. This was the Go square on the monopoly board. If we crossed, we collected $200 (or roughly 170 British pounds at the beginning of our trip, and 185 by the end.) Otherwise we went straight back to vacation jail.

So yes, I cried in the cab on the way out of the airport. Softly, and to myself, huddled against the window as we passed through the London suburbs on the way to our hotel. Because this threshold had been passed. And I was finally allowed to let this fixation go and believe that whatever this time and moment would be, could happen.

So just like our cab, let’s get to London. I’ve never been to the UK in any capacity, so there were never any auspices that we would be able to properly visit London, but it was also, if I’m being candid, less interesting to me than Scotland.

So the more we planned and revised our trip, the less time we allowed for London. What began as three days in London became two, in order to accommodate another full day in Inverness dedicated to Scotch tasting. And then finally ended at just one, in order to allow for another full day in Skye.

We finally ended up in a place where London served mostly as a buffer against having to sprint directly from a delayed flight to missing an on-time train, while also being a way to more quickly acclimate to the time differences from California.

The key to acclimating to jet lag is, I’m told, to dedicate yourself to staying up as late as possible the first day you get there, crash out at no earlier than 10pm, and to wake up in the morning at whatever time you normally would. This works roughly half the time for me, and either results in staggering success as I immediately adopt to local time anywhere in the world, or it results in me inhabiting some semi-drunken liminal space between exhausted to the point of non functionality and entirely unable to fall asleep. So vacation-wise, this is what you’d call a high risk/high reward choice. Regardless, it was the plan on hand here, so once we found our hotel and checked in at 11am, we immediately splashed some water on our faces and got to wandering.

So what did I learn from our 25,000 steps and 10 miles of walking through the city? Well, we got a chance to play the hits, as it were: we walked past Big Ben and the House of Parliament as we strolled down the Thames. We walked (quickly) past the London Eye as I (once again) disappointed Beth because I would rather perch naked atop a medieval bonfire than ride even the most innocuous and well-maintained of ferris wheels. We walked through the Theatre district and Soho and Covent Garden looking for lunch. We slipped into the British Library to gaze at their rare books collections, and walked through Trafalgar Square alongside every young family in the entirety of the UK.

But those are just spaces and places. Those aren’t feelings I remember, they’re just what we did. And because we spent so little time there, I never really got a feel of London’s identity as a city.

But here are the things that stood out to my memory: we finally stopped for lunch sometime around 3pm, wandering into an old pub in Covent Garden only to find out that it’s one of the oldest pubs in the city, a former watering hole of Charles Dickens, and used to be known as “Bucket of Blood” due to its bare knuckle boxing matches upstairs. The food was good, the atmosphere was dark, and I was able to check off “eat proper pub food and drink a proper cask ale from a proper British pub” from my travel list.

Later that evening, we had perhaps the opposite experience, as we followed a dinner recommendation that brought us to Coal Drops Yard in Kings Cross, a resolutely and painfully cool redeveloped victorian-era coal yard that now houses art galleries and restaurants and retail. Walking into the complex, the sun lit up the sky like fire, and cast a warm hue over brick and cobbles, and buildings made of stone and iron. I love reclaimed spaces like this - something that really charmed me about Estonia in particular. There’s something wonderful about the contrast of modern fashion boutiques and art galleries and semi-experimental restaurants - all what you would call nonessential goods - set amongst what was once strictly and pragmatically industrial.

We didn’t end up eating at the place recommended to us, because it seemed silly to wait the estimated 45 minutes for a table when there were 15 other seemingly excellent restaurants with no wait. So, as is obviously the case, 45 minutes of menu perusing and negotiating later (“We live in LA - we don’t need to fly to London for carnitas babe”) we chose a little Spanish place atop the plaza that boasted a lovely ambiance, run by a charming young Spanish gentlemen who hit on literally everyone at all times.

As the sun went down, the wind kicked up, and what we thought was just Spanish food showed itself to be a little kismet. “You don’t know Parrilla?” the proprietor asked us, in something that approached aghast. “How you don’t know about parrilla?” Perhaps an honest question, but one impossible to answer beyond simply committing to the the original premise of our abject ignorance. “No matter, tonight I teach you.”

Thank god, because I briefly thought that we were either going to be slung out and banned on our own recognizance, or simply put to work in the back until we could recite the menu options to our unsuspecting replacements.

It turns out that “parrilla” is Spanish for “Grill” and it involves a restauranteur blindly trusting the guests - to whom he is serving hilariously oversized gin and tonics - with raw meat, an open flame, and various stabby objects with which to combine the two in accordance with some modicum of safety.

No, we didn’t hurt ourselves, or continue the unfortunate tradition of me getting food poisoning on vacation (See: Paris, Seattle, and various others.) What we did have was a lovely evening drinking G&Ts and cooking seafood around an open flame, while being grilled ourselves every ten minutes on how each course was being received.

All in all, it was lovely, and ensured we didn’t get back home until 11pm. And slept soundly until morning.

After making our way to Kings Cross station (walking distance from our hotel, but we didn’t) we met up with Beth’s cousin Kelly and her husband Thom for the train up to Edinburgh. After the requisite Platform 9 3/4 activities, we spent the morning catching up on everything that had happened since we saw them last … many years ago, as the train lumbered along between towns in The North. Our conversation was easy, despite the time apart, and Thom’s selections of both snacks and train beers was excellent. So we’d chat for a few minutes and then slowly go silent as we all looked out the window whenever the train tracks once again found the sea. This happened with increasing frequently until the water dominated our view without interference - like a child who had kept their comfort blanket within eyeline at all times, until they finally decided that it needed to be right next to them right now.

All in all, not a bad way to spend three hours. But what came next was the true highlight. Because then we finally got to Edinburgh.

Here’s the headline: Edinburgh is perhaps the perfect old world city. (I originally wrote “European city” but whelp…) It’s small enough to be entirely walkable, but large enough to have several distinct districts that all carry their own personalities. You could explore a sizable majority of its shops and restaurants over the course of the year and start to build out some favorites, but there are enough that you’d never get bored.

And oh god it is so wonderfully, surprisingly, almost painfully beautiful. A generous mix of “really very old” and “new-ish, but still probably older than the United States,” combined with an artistic flair that meant that building may look like it was a dungeon, but it might very well be a vegan restaurant or coffee shop or bicycle sales and repair. It was lived in, but not cold. Worn, but welcoming. It was a favorite sweater. And walking around, it was impossible not to immediately picture ourselves spending more and more time there.

We were so charmed by Edinburgh. And it’s good that we were, because our first few moments in the city, spent just getting from the train to our apartment, were an exercise in actual, literal pain.

To her credit, the owner of our apartment told us not to trust Google Maps, as it would take us up a hilariously steep and monstrously long set of stairs instead of asking us to simply walk one short block over and go up the gently sloping curved street. This is something we remembered halfway up a set of hilariously steep and monstrously long stairs. On the other hand Google assured us that this route would shave off nearly fourteen seconds of our journey, thus improving our lives in every possible way. While this may have been true from a strictly temporal standpoint, Google did not consider that we were hauling two sets of luggage, each packed for two full weeks abroad, coming in just barely under the weight allowance of United’s checked bag policy. So instead of tick-tack-tick-tacking our luggage up the wide and comfortably inclined road from the train station to our apartment, we fucking manhandled those bitches up a quarter mile’s worth of dark and slippery alleyway stairs while swearing and sweating profusely.

But we did make it. To our fifth floor walk up in Old Town(e). With the narrowest staircase known to mankind, modeled after an actual castle’s spiral tower stairs. Seriously, had someone told me this was enacted in medieval times to prevent attacking knights from being able to draw their swords, I would have nodded along and had no further questions. Well, I might have asked why medieval knights had shoulders that were so much narrower than mine, because I could only fit sideways. As it was, we made it through our second surprise workout of the day just in time to head out and see the city for real.

We had some time before we were meeting Kelly and Thom at their swanky hotel for swanky happy hour wine, which gave us enough time to enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells of Old Town.

Growing up in California, “old” has a different meaning than anywhere across The Atlantic. “Old” in California is the early 1900s; “really old” is the 1800s. Maybe it’s because drunken mining towns weren’t built to stand the test of time, but the oldest building in Old Sacramento only goes back to 1852, and it feels positively ancient in comparison. Meanwhile in Edinburgh, two of the neighborhoods are called Old Town and New Town (pragmatically creative, those Scots.) Predictably, New Town, where all the swanky new buildings are, was mostly built in the 1700s.

As I mentioned, our apartment was in the middle of Old Town - purposefully. For as much time as I’ve spent in hotels, I don’t consider it a feature that every Hilton or Marriott feels the same. They’re designed to be generically neutral. So when given the opportunity, we always try to stay somewhere with actual personality. This isn’t to say that we’re roughing it in a concrete box without plumbing - our Old Town apartment still had a Nest thermostat, for example. But I can understand what that space originally looked and felt like, and what purpose it served. It doesn’t blend into the background and disappear of our memory like any given hotel room would.

I can tell you that the hallway floor creaked at night but not in the daytime. That the kitchen was dark but still felt warm. That the shower had three too many knobs to control the amount and temperature of the water, and that all of the important ones were perfectly smooth and impossible to grip with soap on your hands. I can tell you that the sofa was comfortable, the kitchenette table was perfectly positioned to catch the morning sunlight, and that the bed was soft. I can tell you that by 8am you could smell the coffee from the shop down on street level. And that the nine billion stairs to get there from the entrance were all too narrow and curved for a single human male carrying a large suitcase in each hand.

But that space remains in my mind. I can imagine it again as I recount our time there. For a moment, albeit briefly, we were there. And there’s something … important to that. For me, anyway. But being in Edinburgh is intertwined and interconnected with being in that space in that moment, and that’s my preference.

— — — — —

“When we watched the sunset … over the castle on the hill”

Google Maps told us that we were a 40 minute walk from Kelly and Thom, so we deliberately took the route that brought us through the oldest parts of Edinburgh. Down the cobbles and up the hills, through streets obviously not designed for cars, we passed restaurants and bars and shops that all had the quintessential UK charm to them. The weather was a peculiar blend of too hot in the sun, and too cold in the shade, so instead of picking one and committing to a sweater, we simply bounced back and forth between the two in order to half-ass spit roast ourselves into a happy medium.

And this is right about when we fell in love with the city.

Just as we were remarking about how much this particular street reminded us specifically of a small part of Paris, we got to a corner and both stopped, as our eyes were unconsciously pulled upwards. There, on the hill, stood Edinburgh Castle. Built deliberately at the very edge of a rocky outcropping, it sits almost perched above the rest of the town. I’m sure it was pragmatically placed there for reasons of “we haven’t invented planes yet, so good luck scaling this, motherfuckers,” but for the modern world the castle doesn’t loom overhead so much as recline upon the hill and gaze downwards towards the town.

This would become a common theme in Edinburgh Because the rest of the town is built encircling the castle, and spread out below the hill from there, it became common for us to be talking and walking and then between buildings or crossing an intersection you glance over to your left and there it sits: atop its hill, magnificent.

Thom, being the most organized of the three of us, had provided everyone with a list of options for every meal and activity we could possibly consider over the coming few days we’d spend together in Edinburgh. Seven pages long, single spaced, there were a bevy of options all organized by activity, time, and personal preferences. If it sounds like I’m making fun, I’m not - it was lovingly crafted and immensely useful. Throughout our happy hour, drinking perfectly acceptable (free) wine, we were somehow able to narrow it down to a single restaurant for that nights dinner - a modern restaurant in an newer building (new for Edinburgh, not California) with a lovely view of the sun setting over what was once a church.

My memory of the meal is that it was fine, but the thing that stood out was how the waitstaff took our orders, and then forgot about us entirely for 90 minutes - to the tune that whole other parties were seated, appetized, entreed, and all paid up between the time we ordered our food and the time our first course came out. We were so busy catching up with each other that we didn’t notice for the first hour. Granted, we weren’t in a rush, and we weren’t particularly hungry when we got there, but we certainly were by the time our food arrived. I watched our waiter’s face as he glanced over at us, realized we were still the same party he last spoke with during the Thatcher administration, and panicked. We were quickly granted a small plate of olives as an apology gift once we were rediscovered amongst the ancient ruins of the window tables, and our food came out a little bit later, alongside some mumbled apologies and what I have to assume was some manner of internal flagellation. No matter, we had spent the time watching the sunset across the steeple and stonework.

Our first night also brought with it our first proper Scotch tasting, and my understanding of why so much of the city seemed to have not just a Harry Potter feeling, but seemed to be stealing liberally from the Harry Potter style guide. If you weren’t aware, Edinburgh is not only where JKR write the first books, but much of the setting and style for both the books and the eventual films was heavily influenced by the look and feel of Edinburgh. And hoooo boy do they know it. Were you somehow unaware of the books or films, you would assume that “Harry Potter” was the most popular clan in all of Scotland.

As it stood, McGonagall’s Gin and Whisky was Thom List Approved™ and across the street from the restaurant, so that became the location for what was our very first Scotch tasting of the trip (outside of the aforementioned airport lounge.) I felt I had no choice but to pick the regional option, seeing as how my personal philosophy skews so heavily towards “understand a culture through its food.” So three lovely drams later, spanning Speyside, Islay, and Campbelltown, I decided that perhaps I was still a little low on culture, and some specific Speyside understanding was what I really needed right now.

All in all, it was a lovely way to spend the evening. And as we made our way back to the apartment, I couldn’t help but steal a few more glances of the Castle - lit from below, and cast against the night sky, it looked like a palace for the gods.

Day two in Edinburgh was about properly wandering, in order to more deliberately absorb the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of the city (apologies for breaking alliteration.) From touring the castle to trying haggis for the first time (but not the last time, because it turns out that haggis is delicious - more on that later) to the Scotch Whisky Experience tourist trap that was 1000 times better than it needed to be Edinburgh continued to present us with more than we expected.

One of the more prominent takeaways I have from our time in Scotland really began in Edinburgh: the idea that any given experience in Scotland would be so much more than it justifiably needed to be. To explain, let me give you an example:

As I said, right next to Edinburgh castle - the most prominent tourist destination in the city - there’s a man handing out flyers for something called The Scotch Whisky Experience. And when I say “right next to” I mean the building it inhabits is literally connected to the outer castle walls. We’re talking a prime location at the biggest tourist spot in the whole city. 100% tourist trap material right here.

So being absolute lushes (and because it was Thom List Approved™) we had to do it. It was an “experience” right? Not just a Scotch tasting, but a Scotch experience. We went in knowing with all our Angeleno hearts that we were at the Hollywood and Highland of Edinburgh, and were about to put our hands in the Mann’s Chinese Theater concrete handprints for the low, low price of 32 pounds per person. (There was a lower priced 19 pound “silver” tour and tasting, but dammit I’m worth the gold tour.)

We were not prepared for the sheer amount of genuine excellence of this experience. This was Mr Toad’s Fucking Wild Ride of Whisky. And I mean that directly: it starts with an actual fucking ride. You get into a Scotch barrel and are taken through a full sensory, 20 minute, holographic overview of how Scotch is made, and the history of Scotch in Scotland. And then the actual tour begins, where your tour guide breaks down the regions of Scotland, regional flavor profiles, how to nose Scotch, and the historical influences that give each region the reputation and flavors they have.

And this isn’t just a video presentation - it’s all interactive. There are multiple rooms. And light shows. And an hour later, THEN you get to the tasting!

And lemme be clear: the gold tour promised five tastings, and these are full tastings of proper Scotches. Heavy pours. Not Polaris lounge pours (thank god, that would have actually killed us) but we’re talking generous doubles of five distinct and different Scotches, all at least 10 years old, each representing a specific region.

And the best part? This tasting takes place inside the largest Scotch archive in the world.

By walking into this place at all, were already tourist trapped and willing to just go with whatever. They didn’t need to try and impress us. We would have been perfectly happy with something that was “fine.” We were expecting something that was “acceptable” for whatever we ended up paying. But when we talked about it later - look, 90 minutes of information, five drinks, and a ride for 32 pounds each seems like a damn good deal. Hell, it feel cheap for the experience we got. They didn’t need to go this hard.

But this kind of thing kept happening again and again. The National Museum of Scotland - it’s free, so how cool can it be, right? Oh, ever heard of Dolly? The cloned sheep? Here she is. In the hall of science with at least 10 million dollars of interactive scientific exhibits. And right next to the “history of transportation in Scotland” exhibit with another 10 million dollars worth of cars (including a whole wall of Formula 1 cars, somehow.) Oh, and here are some full sized dinosaurs - they’re just across from the actual viking village we set up in this room. We spent three hours there, and only left because we had dinner reservations.

This kept happening to us over and over again (I can’t wait to tell you about Clynelish tomorrow…) There was something that we kept running into, where Scotland seemed wonderfully committed to taking our expectations of how much effort would be put into something that, to be perfectly frank didn’t require a ton of effort, and just blowing them out of the water, straight into the atmosphere, and letting those expectations circle around the earth a few times before settling back down again.

Anyway, back to the trip.

The rest of Edinburgh was merely breathtaking. Old town was full of wide streets that had been “designed” by simply being beaten into the earth, claimed by horses and carriages, reclaimed by cars, and then grudgingly - but definitively - reclaimed for people. Our timing was pretty stellar: we’d landed just a few days after the Fringe Festival, and after the official end of tourist season, so it never felt crowded. However it did feel wonderfully alive. There was an electric buzz to the city - not like New York or New Orleans has a buzz that pushes you along to do more, longer, later, always. But more like a sauntering buzz that encouraged you to sit down for a bit at this pub and relax outside for a bit. Maybe have a pint or two for no real reason. Listen to this street band playing electric guitar and bagpipes in front of this 15th century church. You know - refuel your soul for a bit. There will be plenty of time for everything, promise.

And there was. So we did. More than once. And while doing so we saw Edinburgh castle inside and out, did the Scotch Whiskey Experience, met the tiniest horned owl named Einstein, walked all of Princes street, had fish and chips and haggis (more on that later) in a pub, danced on cobblestones, walked through two museums, considered dozens of kilts and scarves, got lost, pointed at the architectural differences between two nearby churches, hiked up and down more hills than I can remember, and found ourselves back where we started at the castle.

Never once did it feel rushed. The city seemed to say “there will be time.” Because Edinburgh feels wonderfully, joyfully, whimsically timeless.

The night began to wrap up in New Town (where the roads were still cobbled, but straight now) at a whimsically eclectic restaurant called Noto whose menu is the kind of experimental culinary creativity that results only in edge cases. Nothing was “fine” - it was either a home run or a strikeout - thankfully mostly the former. The dish I most remember is either the whipped crab butter served with fresh made sourdough (which makes total sense, despite it not being anything I would ever think of) or the jalapeño olive oil burrata - which shouldn’t work but really, really did.

Afterwards, we grabbed a nightcap at a local pub (which wasn’t The Shoogly Peg, despite my absolute insistence that I really needed to go somewhere called The Shoogly Peg as soon as I saw a sign for The Shoogly Peg) for a couple pints and some friendly moments with the locals. After dropping off Thom and Kelly at their hotel, Beth and I wandered another hour or two, partly because we were enjoying the crisp of the night, and partly because we were delaying the inevitable reality that we’d be leaving the city tomorrow. We found a giant Frankenstein statue, and looked at a few more churches, and she rubbed the nose of Greyfriars Bobby (a very good dog, but a very sad story.) Eventually left with no other options besides “find yet another pub” we decided to make our way home for the evening.

Our final morning in Edinburgh started with coffee with Kelly and Thom at a roaster that was cosplaying as Silverlake (maybe there are some universals after all) and then we were to pick up our rental car in order to begin the actual road trip part of our vacation.

Now, I wasn’t precisely nervous about driving in Scotland, but I was a little nervous about beginning the journey in a city. Everyone told me that you got used to driving on the left side of the road pretty quickly, but I would have much preferred that comfort be obtained in the relative safety of the Scottish countryside. But sometimes the world conspires to assure you that things are going to be alright - or at the very least gets you to stop brain looping about a problem you have no present capacity to solve.

In this case, after checking out of our apartment and calling an Uber to the car rental facility, we spent the next 30 minutes with a gruff former SAS soldier (he never mentioned it, but certain tattoos are pretty good giveaways of a past life) with the thickest Scottish brogue we’d encounter on our entire trip. He immediately began telling us everything he hated about Edinburgh and the tourists who visit Edinburgh, why it was a terrible city full of terrible people, and why everything was awful, forever, and we should hate it too. Of which I was able to catch maybe every third word. And I slowly realized that this was all happening to the musical background track of the most bubblegum top 40 pop you can imagine. I’m talking everything from Kylie in her prime, to modern Kpop. If there was a male performer in this 30 minute trip, I don’t remember it. But I do remember him describing the “most terrible” (“terrible” being a five syllable word, with three of them being the “r”s) part of Edinburgh where the tourists ruin the grit and grime of it all, and I remember that Christina crooned her approval and disapproval alongside for emphasis.

But as we pulled into the car rental facility, he turned down Toxic (the song, not the vitriol) long enough to tell us that he was really glad we weren’t at all like any of those people, told us we were going to have a lovely time on our trip, heartily shook both of our hands with his baseball glove-sized hands, and gave us his advice for “the secret trick” on how to manage roundabouts, just for good luck. (The secret trick is that since no one knows when you’re supposed to get off, if you miss your exit you can just go around again as many times as you need. He’s right - it works.)

This marked the official shift in our trip from city trip to road trip, and it strikes me that it’s also a good place to take a break from our story. So as we get ready to set out by car into the highland wilds of Scotland, we’ll see you on the left side of the road tomorrow - on our way to Aberdeenshire, and a very important castle.