Back in 2015, Shae and I visited Edinburgh, the Isle of Arran and London with our friends Mark and Megan. We all flew into London Heathrow, then took another flight up to Edinburgh.
At Heathrow, we got chatting to a couple who said they were meeting up with their own friends who they often travel with. They’d first met on a Saga holiday (Saga is the UK’s version of AARP) and enjoyed each other’s company so much, they decided to continue traveling with them.
The four of us thought that sounded like fun, so we figured that if our first trip together went well, we’d continue to have vacation adventures together and call them Sagas. Well, that first trip was a hit, so in 2017 we traveled with them to Ireland and then to London and Paris in 2023.
Well, we’ve actually now had four Sagas as Megan, Mark, Shae and I just wrapped up an almost two week trip to celebrate my 45th birthday and had an amazing time.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing all about what we got up to, because it was a lot! It was a ridiculously fun trip full of castles, whiskey, lambs, incredible accommodation, stunning scenery and so much more. Before we get into more detailed trip reports though, I thought I’d write a quick intro summarizing what our initial plans were.
Trip Concept
Shae started discussing the trip with Mark and Megan more than a year ago as she wanted to surprise me with a trip to Scotland for my birthday to do all things whiskey. I managed to convince her to share the idea with me because I enjoy trip planning, plus it made sense for me to know seeing as I’m the one more familiar with how we could use hotel points and airline miles to our advantage.
I loved the idea of spending more time in Scotland as we’d only spent a few days there together in the past, although I’d also gone to Aberdeen and the Orkney Islands quickly during a Frequent Miler challenge a few years ago. We started brainstorming ideas, with Mark and Megan finding all kinds of fascinating things to see and do in the Highlands.
There were so many places we wanted to visit that we couldn’t fit them all within one trip. We finally settled on the following itinerary though.
Day 1 – London
At the time, we’d expected to be living in the US when this trip came around, but that subsequently changed and we moved to the UK a few weeks before the trip. That worked out well as it meant we had bought a car by the time they arrived in the UK rather than us needing to rent one for a couple of weeks. They flew into London Heathrow airport and we picked them up from there.
Rather than immediately heading up north, we decided to spend a night in London. I booked us a stay at a unique hotel, we got timed tickets to the British Museum (our friends missed out on that during our last visit) and we made dinner reservations at a quirky restaurant which has to be seen – or, more pertinently – not seen to be believed.
Day 2 – Liverpool
It takes 7-12 hours to get from London to Scotland, depending on whereabouts in Scotland you’re visiting. We didn’t fancy making that drive in one day, so a good (almost) halfway point was Liverpool.
Shae and I had spent a few days in Liverpool before and it’s somewhere we’re considering moving to now that we’re living in the UK. Our friends hadn’t been though, but Mark especially is a Beatles fan. We therefore booked a hotel just around the corner from the Cavern Club and planned to spend the evening/next morning doing Beatles-y stuff.
Day 3 – Falkirk
Some time ago, I’d seen a video of the Falkirk Wheel. It’s a unique piece of engineering which uses a rotating wheel to raise and lower barges (narrowboats) up and down canals, rather than using a system of locks. I’d long been interested in seeing it in action, but I subsequently discovered that you can actually take a ride on the wheel in a boat. Tickets didn’t go on sale until a few weeks before the trip, but as soon as they were available, I snapped up four of them.
Falkirk is also home to The Kelpies which are two massive sculptures of horse heads that are a big draw for people passing through the area. They looked cool online and we figured they’d look even better in person.
We weren’t sure how much time we’d need in Liverpool that morning, so we decided to simply book a stay in Falkirk that night before continuing on.
Days 4-7 – Fort William
Early on in the planning process, Shae had expressed an interest in visiting Fort William. That’s near both Inverlochy Castle and Eilean Donan Castle, both of which had appeared in some books she’d read.
Well, imagine how excited I was – and then Shae when I told her – when I discovered that Inverlochy Castle is part of Small Luxury Hotels of the World which is now part of Hilton. That meant we could book a stay there using Hilton Honors points or Hilton free night certificates. By loading up on Hilton certificates through various means (new and renewing Hilton Aspire credit cards, as well as spending $15,000 on some other Hilton cards) and being flexible with our dates, we were able to book two rooms for three consecutive nights at Inverlochy Castle.
Shae and Megan are massive Harry Potter fans and all four of us enjoy the movies, so a trip to Fort William would be made even better by the fact that many locations from the movies were filmed there. That includes the Glenfinnan Viaduct that the Hogwarts Express travels over, Dumbledore’s grave, the Black Lake and more.
Days 7-10 – Isle of Skye
We’d gone back and forth about visiting the Isle of Skye, Isle of Harris and the Orkney Islands. In the end we settled on the Isle of Skye and boy, am I glad we did. The three days there were unbelievable in so many ways.
The cottage we stayed in was one of the best places Shae and I have ever stayed in and we spent seven years living in hotels and Airbnbs on our 50 state road trip from 2018-2024. Skye was beautiful, there were newborn lambs everywhere, magical scenery, a superb whiskey experience and much, much more.
Day 10 – Inverness
Our end destination with Mark and Megan was Aberdeen, but there was a ton of stuff we wanted to see along the way. There was no way we’d be able to cram it all into one day (we ended up not even being able to cram it all into two days!), so we booked an overnight stop in Inverness.
In addition to Loch Ness along the way, I came across a fun-looking whiskey experience at a bar in Inverness which ended up being even better than we could’ve anticipated.
Day 11 – Aberdeen
As I mentioned above, our final destination on this trip was Aberdeen. I’d picked that for a couple of reasons. One is that there were nonstop flights from there to London Heathrow for which we could redeem British Airways Avios in order for Mark and Megan to position themselves for their flight back to the US.
The other is that Megan in particular loves castles and 20 minutes south of Aberdeen is the picture-perfect Dunnottar Castle. I’d visited it during that past Frequent Miler challenge and knew all three of them would love it too, so I wanted them to have a chance to experience it.
Days 12-15 – Aberdeen
Mark and Megan flew back to the US at this point, but Shae and I needed to stay up in Scotland for another week – more about that in the next section. We knew we’d probably be exhausted at that point, so we decided to stay another four nights at the same hotel to rest and work before heading back west to Fort William.
Days 15-17 – Fort William
Despite doing as much advance planning as possible, unfortunately one thing didn’t work out. We really wanted to get tickets for all four of us to ride on the Jacobite steam train that passes over the Glenfinnan Viaduct. By the time we went to book it though, they were sold out for all 11 days that Mark and Megan would be with us, so no amount of flexibility would help.
That was really disappointing, but Shae and I got lucky. A few days after our friends were due to fly back, there were steam train tickets bookable. Their work commitments meant their travel dates couldn’t be rejigged, but we were flexible. Shae and I therefore booked a couple of tickets for ourselves and made another reservation for two nights at Inverlochy Castle.
The roundup above doesn’t do justice to all of the fun that we had during the trip. The activities were nonstop, with the amazing memories we created as a result also being nonstop. Of the four Sagas we’ve had to far, this was my favorite.
I therefore can’t wait to share more about all the different parts of our trip in the coming weeks to hopefully give more inspiration for your own travels. Stay tuned!
Leave a Reply