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Scotland

And a little bit of England, too

By Bob Ransom

February 24^th, 2018

THE LONG WAY TO ICELAND

When my wife, Jeanie, and I started planning our summer trip to Iceland, we'd heard of Icelandair's "Stopover" flights, where you buy a round-trip ticket to a European destination but then do a multi-day layover in Iceland, but we didn't really expect to take advantage of the program. We figured a quick few days in New York then two weeks in Iceland would be just fine. And then we checked the prices....

Surprise, surprise, it was actually cheaper to fly to Reykjavik using the Stopover feature, provided we went to one of a handful of European destinations, than to simply round-trip from NYC. Which, of course, makes no sense at all. But since the opportunity presented itself and since we love Scotland, we decided that we'd drop into Edinburgh (via Glasgow's airport) for a couple of days before continuing on to Iceland.

A bus tour? Really?

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.

Rosslyn chapel

Unfortunately, they don't allow photos to be taken inside.

MELROSE ABBEY

HADRIAN’S WALL AND HOUSESTEADS FORT

THE BORDER AND JEDBURGH ABBEY

After a quick stop at the border, just for a leg-stretch, we headed to Jedburgh to visit the 12th century abbey. Unfortunately, we were running a little late and the abbey was already closed for the day. We made do with sticking our cameras through the fence. And then it was back on the bus for the final drive back into Edinburgh.