Scotland Day 1 - Stirling

A beautiful, rainy, foggy, and green country. I came to Scotland with Marko and his parents. The story behind why we’re here is pretty old. Marko was playing golf a lot during his teenage period. He was very good at it and was playing for Slovenian national golf team. When he was finishing high school his parent promised him a trip to Scotland because in the golf was born in the north of United Kingdom in a town called St. Andrews. Marko was a great student and then he continued with his professional career so there was no time for a trip to Scotland. But the parents’ promise remained and somehow now came the time to go and I’m very happy to be here with them.

We flew from Vienna to Edinburgh. When we came to Edinburgh we went to a car rental center (you can’t miss it because is very well marked airport) where we took our pre-booked car and drove for an hour to the Stirling castle. Because of heavy rain and Marko’s knee injury we decided not to visit it. If you want to visit it the entrance for an adult is15 £. Instead, we went to have a lunch at lovely restaurant Brea. The food was great but what stayed even more in my head was a very nice and polite waitress. She also gave us a great landscape viewpoint advice called Rest and be Thankful. After a delicious lunch, we walked throughout the old city center of Stirling and came across The Burgh Coffeehouse where we had a coffee, tea, and chocolate desert.

After a pleasant first impression of Scotland city, we continued our journey to the William Wallace monument. Sir William Wallace was a Scottish knight who was one of the main leaders during the Wars of Scottish Independence between 1297 and 1298. If you want to see his story watch the movie Braveheart – although some say the movie is historically inaccurate and it “almost totally sacrifices historical accuracy for epic adventure”. If you want you can walk to the top of the tower but we were too late and the William Wallace monument was already closed. We already noticed that in Scotland most of the shops and cafés close around five. But no need to worry as you have a lot of pubs open in the evening to get a drink.

We headed to our first stay through wonderful Scotland landscape. We saw a lot of sheep farms on our way to Abbotsford Hotel. We had a long day behind us which started at 4 o’clock in Slovenia and we slept that night like babies. Marko’s knee was badly swollen and he had ice on it during the whole night so it got better until the morning. We continued our adventure to the north. To be continued in the next post. 🙂