We have a plan in place for the trip and will do our best to stick to it, but that will most certainly not happen. That’s part of the fun of a trip like this though. Plans are useless but planning is essential. Who cares who said it, it applies here in the most serious sense. We all love adventure until you don’t have an internet connection or clean clothes.

This all started as an idea of what to do with an American Airlines gift card Pubba received from work as a Christmas present. Where should we go? Where would we want to go? How do we make the most of this situation? Well, first you look at all the options locally and quickly eliminate them because they don’t seem ambitious enough for your appetite. So we decided to make an international trip but to where became the question again for us to take on. English speaking was preferred and getting out into nature was on the top of the list. After some diligent searching by Pubba we arrived, figuratively, on Scotland. The more looked, the more we felt that this was the perfect destination right now for us. With that settled we could move on to the countless questions that followed for us to make this a reality.

When I was in seventh grade, I was fortunate enough to take a class trio to Washington DC the summer before eighth grade. Our lead chaperone was giving us some details of our itinerary and said that there would be no way to see everything on this trip and that she herself had taken many trips to DC and failed to see everything on her list. That was hard for me to accept because when would I get back here to see it all. It was naïve on my part to expect such a thing but from then on, every place I go I refuse to get anxious about having to see all the places. I want to experience this new place, not rush through, and take pictures to attempt relive it later.