Day #6 - St. Andrew's & Inverness

After three days in Edinburgh, we rented a car to hear north up to the Scottish Highlands, specifically...Loch Ness. We researched all of the sites between the city and our final destination, and decided to make St. Andrew's our detour.

We chose to take side roads (vs. a main highway) to head over there, and were surprised at how narrow, winding and tiny (single carriageway, or even one lane) these roads were. What was not as surprising, was how pretty the drive was.- endless lush green farmland, windmills and fall leaves.

As someone who grew up playing the game of golf, it was difficult to not hear the name 'Royal & Ancient St. Andrews' a lot. It's widely regarded as the birthplace of golf, and along with Augusta or Pebble Beach- a mecca for players worldwide. Perhaps even moreso, as you can enter a lottery to get a tee time (it's not exclusive/private).

Although I have zero exposure to the sport anymore, and haven't for well over 20 years, I still couldn't help but want to at least visit the course. It's like being in Washington DC for the first (and only) time in your life as an American, and declining to take peek or gander at the White House. You just...have to.

So we drove the hour (it's quite close to Edinburgh) to St. Andrew's, and despite being a wildly famous attraction- is quietly tucked away, with almost zero fanfare. In fact- I would say it has roughly the same amount of signage/fanfare one might expect for the local public library. I'm not sure what I was expecting- a wide, busy roadway with miles of billboards hyping its presence to a stream of cars/rubbernecking tourists and uniformed police officers directing us to move along? 

But what I got was the same narrow, 2-lane roads, and almost no signs announcing it's location. In fact, we passed it and had to double back. 

But I've jumped ahead here... Once we got to the town (which again, was markedly smaller than I'd expected), we were hungry for lunch, so we drove straight into town. The town was like two long strips of Main St, Quaint Town, Scotland. Despite hosting the most famous golf course in the world, and the nation's top ranked (and oldest) university that Prince William & Princess Kate attended...it looks and feels far more like a teeny tiny, quaint, historic college town. Were there adorable old fashioned ice cream shops and cute boutiques selling wool scarves and sweaters? Yes, and yes. It felt like we were visiting Grandpa and Grandma's town out in the countryside, except with endless historic charm.

And amongst all of that? Just a few stunning medieval cathedral and castle ruins near the ocean. 

Yawn. No big deal.

Ryan wanted to see a bit of the campus, so we walked around, and located the campus bookstore so he could get a few school supplies. 

The golf course was our final destination, where we saw the legendary clubhouse, and watched a few players and their caddies marching down a hole to hit approach shots to the green.

There were zero tourists, zero roped off/fenced areas and endless places to park and gawk. About the diametrical opposite of what I'd anticipated needing to do to get a glimpse of the links! There is a lot more I could have seen/done at the course, but I'd gotten my glimpse, and I was content to call it a day and head back north the Highlands, as we still had a 4+ hour ahead of us. And since it was already well past 1-2pm when we got there, we had only a few hours until the sun set (it set at about 4:10pm daily) and we wanted to get to Loch Ness quickly in time for Ryan's parent-teacher zoom conference that evening at 7pm.

Note: We failed to make it to our hotel in time for the meeting, and ended up zooming from our rental car, at a gas station. Always classy! ;-) 

Once the conference was done, we had another 20 min or so to get to the northernmost tip of the loch before wrapping back down around it to our hotel. We were surprised there were no bridges to cross over from the large, nearby city of Inverness, and that we had to all the way up and around the loch...but we did, and got to our hotel that evening. Once there, I told Rich I needed our passports to get check in, as it was a small family inn, and I was sure they would require documentation, COVID cards, and a credit card/ID.

And um...nope. Wrong again! I walked into the tiny bar, told the bartender we were checking in (we appeared to the only car at the inn). She smiled, handed me a room key and hustled off to serve her one customer (a man who looked 80, and half asleep).