We thought about renting a car while in Scotland as we wanted to get our of the city for at least one day but finally decided it made much more sense to skip the car, save the Scottish public from our rusty (or frightening) "driving on the left" skills, and just rely on public transportation. Plus, parking a car anywhere near our Airbnb, just off the Royal Mile, was going to be a pain. But then cobbling together train and bus tickets to get us where we wanted to go seemed like a lot of work, too. So we started looking at one-day bus tours.
Generally speaking, we're not bus tour people. The idea of following someone else's minute-by-minute schedule doesn't sit well; eating at specified tourist-filled restaurants and shopping in specified touristy stores doesn't work for us, either. Nope, thanks, we'll just go on our own. But given our short time there — really only two full days — a quick, day-long tour seemed like it might work.
We dove into Trip Advisor and came up with a small tour that would fit what we were looking for. Well, actually our first choice, a small tour up into the Highlands, wasn't running the day we had open so we went with choice #2. This would take us to Rosslyn Chapel which we had visited before but was worth a second visit, and then on to Melrose for lunch and the abbey ruins. From there, we headed on to Housesteads, a Roman fort build around AD 124, Hadrian's Wall, and then a final quick stop at Jedburgh Abbey. It turned out to be a good choice with a great driver/guide, and we ended up really enjoying it.