How to plan your Road trip through Scotland

If you’ve spent much time on my blog, you probably have noticed that I LOVE SCOTLAND. Like so much. When we first visited Scotland, it was kind of on a whim since we were already in London and wanted to see another country while we were there. So we were recommended by someone who served an LDS mission in Scotland (so they lived there for two years serving) to make our way up north. Well, the three days were simply not enough! So we knew we needed to make our way there again. But the next time we knew we’d want to road trip through Scotland!

Fast forward three years and we had a week we could finally go back to Scotland! I had a few things on my list that I really wanted to see. We had a finite amount of time and I wanted to make the road trip be the most efficient it could be! At first, we thought we’d do the North Coast 500. Although that would be amazing, it would have taken at least half of the time, maybe more, and we had a few things on our list.

And honestly, we still want to go back! There is so much we still want to see, haha! But, with interest to HOW to start your planning when taking a trip to Scotland, here are my suggestions!

Start making a list of places you want to go

Have a Pinterest board, like mine? Keep getting recommendations and getting lost in what matters most? Well, start a list of the places that look and sound most interesting to you!

Enter the list into Google Maps

This starts to help you understand where things are in conjunction with another. Scotland is about the size of Indiana, but not everything is very close together! Driving takes a while in certain places, especially when you stop to take a lot of photos! This helped me decide our itinerary and what order to do things.

Decide what order you’re going to visit places

I absolutely hate not being efficient, but especially on vacation! I want to know I’m taking the best route possible and that I’m using my time wisely. Once you see everything on the map, it’s easier to know what order to do things based on the location.

Get more detailed

Now that you know the general order of cities on your road trip through Scotland, plan out each stop of that day! For instance, below is the first draft of the first full day of our road trip through Scotland! I knew we were starting in Edinburgh at the Waverley station where we got our rental car. Then I entered all the places I wanted to drive to that were nearby to see how long it would take just to drive, then added the visit time I thought each place would take. I thought we would sleep at St. Andrews, but we actually ended up not doing Doune Castle until later in our trip on the way back to Edinburgh, so we slept in Aberdeen because we wanted to gt up to The Highlands as fast as possible.

Find places to stay

My rule for where we stayed on our road trip through Scotland was all about location! I used Airbnb, Hotels.com, and Visitscotland.com to book our stays. But I do not like driving far just for a place to sleep. I prefer to use google maps to see where I’ll be driving or ending my day then picking a place to stay based on that.

B&B in Fort William

B&B on the Isle of Skye

Our AirB&B in Inverness

Find places to eat

I follow the same type of rule with deciding on where to eat. Where will I already be when it’s mealtime? And then what’s good around there that is within my budget? I know some people operate a lot different with food on vacation! But I’m just not a huge foodie on trips like this. I’ve been known to just eat at the attraction or hotel I’m already at (Culloden Battlefield had some good pies) but I still do my research first. My main goal without road trip through Scotland was to see the things I wanted to see! We also choose to stay places that serve breakfast, both cost and time effective! If you don’t find a place to eat, ask your host where they’d recommend!

Make sure you have enough time

I would suggest adding at least an hour to each long stretch of driving. Our road trip through Scotland was insanely gorgeous! You’re going to see so many things that make you stop in your tracks and soak in the sites. When we drove from Inverness to the Isle of Skye, it was supposed to take about four hours, and instead took around six simply because we kept stopping to take photos or see the highland cows!