Scotland Part 1: The Cursed Trip
One of my favorite parts of travel is the opportunity it gives me to write down my experiences as I wander through some new (to me) foreign land. I try to paint a picture of what it felt like for me, in that specific moment, to be in that specific place. To let you join me in that moment in time as we explore and discover and surprise ourselves in whatever part of the big blue ball we’ve found ourselves. There is joy in the discovery, and I do my absolute best to impart both that joy and that discovery.
It’s so easy to find yourself eating the same thing in the same place and taking the same photos as a million other tourists who’ve come before you. You’re doing “the best” things (according to the wisdom of the crowd) crossing them off a list like you’re aiming for the top score trip combo, but what’s lost is any real authenticity of the place you’re purporting to see and learn more about. So when I travel, I try to get off the beaten path a bit. A little bit lost. And see what I find. And then I come back here, and try to make you feel like you were there too - lost and joyfully found.
So as I ruminate about our two weeks in Scotland, I’m sitting here sort of wondering where to start. The simple solution is to structure this like my Italian trip: a series of posts, each detailing the time we spent in a single city, comparing and contrasting the experience as we moved throughout the country.
But the reality is that Scotland has a far more harmonious similarity to itself than Italy did. (Ironic, given its rich history of conflict between Clans.) I didn’t feel as much differentiation between Crieff and Aberdeenshire as I did between Florence and Genoa, for example. I don’t mean that as a detriment - I’ve often joked that Italy is actually 20 small countries in a trenchcoat trying to get into an R rated movie (or the UN.) Meanwhile in Scotland, I got the sense that what we were seeing was closer to variations on a theme. A gradient of Scottishness. Not even just being “British” or part of the overall UK - though there is obvious overlap - but different interpretations of a larger distinct and genuine Scottish culture that we got to see and feel and taste and smell throughout our journey.
Also, The Queen died while we were there, which was weird. But we’ll get to that later.
So as I sit here back in Los Angeles, wondering where to begin, it occurs to me that perhaps the best beginning of this story starts well before we set foot in the UK.
Years before, in fact.
Because the truth is that this trip was cursed from the beginning.
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One day I’ll get around to writing down my mom’s journey to finding her biological parents. It’s a doozy, with twists and turns so unbelievable that were I to script them out, the development notes would read “a little too on the nose to be believable.” But the short version of it is that for nearly the entirety of her life, my mom had almost no knowledge or information about her biological lineage. None. She knew she was adopted, but that was it. Her parents refused to discuss it, taking that information to their graves, and Oregon’s sealed adoption records meant that even when she knew where those records existed, they were still behind legal walls too thick to penetrate.
This was the case until her late 50s. With a literal lifetime’s worth of work, she finally tracked down and met her biological family on both sides. She finally had a history. A lineage. A story more complete than simply “you were born one day” but one that at last incorporated “because you came from here.”
That “here” included finding out about her Scottish heritage. Now we all assumed, due to her “just shy of albino” complexion and blonde hair, that she was likely predominantly Scottish or Nordic - or that someone had taken a Lifetime movie premise too far and actually fucked a ghost. But now she didn’t have to suspect. She came from a long line of proud Frasers. Very proud Frasers. With very strong roots to their clan and family. And they brought her into that family with open arms and open hearts.
Reader you are warned: here comes the shitty part of the story.
In September of 2018, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. She would fight it, but the odds were long. And the road was difficult. Chemo is rough in the best of circumstances, and this was an aggressive cancer requiring aggressive treatment.
In November, as she was coming back from a chemo session, she told me in the exhausted and slightly loopy post-chemo voice to which I had become accustomed that once she was better next year, she wanted to take a family trip to Scotland. She wanted to visit the town and castle her biological family had come from all those years ago. She wanted to stand in a place and feel the weight of her own history for once in her lifetime.
I told her that once she was better, that’s how we’d celebrate. We’d all go there, and we’d all see that with her. And I meant it - I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate her beating cancer than to finally get to feel that which had eluded her throughout her entire life.
But she didn’t beat cancer.
And she didn’t make it to next year.
By mid-2019, we all intellectually knew that Christmas was never going to feel the same. And we all knew that we didn’t really want to spend Christmas surrounded by the same places, sounds, sights, and smells that enveloped and overwhelmed us as she passed, transmuting themselves into sense memories of her death. So my dad, my brother, my partner, and I planned a trip to visit Scotland for the latter half of December.
We would fulfill her wish. We would spend the anniversary of her death seeing the places that she’d come from. It seemed a fitting tribute.
Two weeks before we were set to leave, we had to cancel that trip. There were a lot of factors, but it mostly came down to the reality that grief his different people in different ways, and what feels like a good idea in a moment sometimes becomes something incomprehensibly difficult to face when you’re staring it down in reality. We instead spent a family Christmas in Austin with my brother, and then Beth and I set out for a week in Seattle for just the two of us. (Whereupon I got violently ill with food poisoning and nearly had to be airlifted to the hospital. A+ Good times all round. No notes.)
But here’s the thing, dear reader: I am stubborn. And my partner is equally so. So we made a decision: I would turn 40 that September, and we would spend my 40th birthday in Scotland.
As part of that celebration we would go to Fraser castle and see some of the lands my mom (and I) came from. But this wouldn’t solely be a solemn journey on her behalf. Just as importantly, we would be celebrating that I’d somehow - against all odds of human experience and basic common sense - managed to survive to an impressively large arbitrary round number. And we’d do so by drinking Scotch, visiting castles, drinking Scotch inside of castles, drinking Scotch next to castles, driving to places to drink Scotch, gazing longingly out towards the lands of my forefathers while propping a single foot upon a small stack of rocks, and seeing which Scotch paired best with haggis.
We’d set the dates, made the plans, planned the routes, and picked the spots. It was an excellent trip. And in September of 2020, we would finally make our way to Scotland!
Yeah. September of 2020.
I don’t know if you read the news, but … international travel didn’t happen that year. (More on that particular birthday’s ultimate shenanigans to come…)
So we postponed it a year. There’s no way that things won’t be back to normal by September 2021, right? It’s not like Covid will still be an issue a whole year from now, right. As soon as a vaccine comes out, everyone’s gonna jump on that so we can get back to normal. And there’s no way that in September of 2021 UK travel restrictions would mean there’s still a solid chance we’d have to spend the majority of any international trip in some hotel quarantine seeing little but the Hilton cable package as we waited for the next room service, right?
Right?
Four years on, the carousel of anticipation and disappointment felt almost de rigueur, as we cancelled our plans again.
Either gluttons for punishment or delightfully unable to read the (global) room, in early 2022 we decided to bite the bullet again, and bought tickets into the UK for September. Part of this was powered by the reality that things really were starting to limp their way back towards some semblance of a new normal, and part of it was just sheer fucking determination that come hell or high water we would be visiting Scotland as our first post-covid international vacation. 42 is the new 40, right?
Spoiler alert: this time it happened.
But I promise you that the level of anxiety I felt around this cursed trip didn’t abate until we actually got into the cab at Heathrow. Until we were literally in the left hand lane of a roundabout headed away from the airport, all I was thinking was “what new fuckery is going to cancel the trip this time?”
Would it be the generally fucked nature of air travel right now? The specifically fucked situation at Heathrow where they were cancelling booked flights into the airport because they couldn’t handle the number of international tourists? Or would it be something much more simple like one or both of us getting Covid right before we were supposed to leave? Leading up to our trip, I was having nightmares almost every night, as some part of my creative subconscious invented a whole new way for things to go absolutely sideways.
But on August 30th, 2022 we freely (and healthily) set foot on UK territory. We weren’t officially in Scotland yet, but the hardest part was done. After four years of trying, and more travails than could have ever been planned for, we were in the UK. And I finally allowed myself to consider the possibility that this might actually be happening.
So if you were on the A4 just outside of Heathrow on September 30th at around 10am Greenwich Mean Time, and remember seeing a bald, bearded man softly crying in the window of a cab, it’s okay. I was fine. I was actually - finally - fine. Because we were actually - finally - here. And this was actually - finally - happening.
— — — — —
So why were we in London, and not Edinburgh? Well, mostly for practical reasons. Due to cost, logistical considerations, and prior experience, we’d given ourself a little bit of a buffer to ensure a single missed flight didn’t continue the curse. So our flight from the US gave us a day in London to acclimate, and then we’d take the train up to Edinburgh where we’d spend a few days exploring the city.
From there we’d head northeast to the Aberdeen area in order to see Castle Fraser, then West through Cairngorms National Park to get to Inverness. A few days in Inverness would let us bounce north to Clynelish distillery and to see Loch Ness, before heading further west to the Isle of Skye for three days of stunning natural beauty. Then it was back southeast to the town (and distillery) of Oban for a day, before ending in Crieff for a few days that included my birthday. Leaving Crieff, we’d drive to Edinburgh to catch a flight to Dublin for a few days before flying home. Basically a big 1000 kilometer loop of the country.
London to Edinburgh to Aberdeenshire to Inverness to Skye to Oban to Crieff to Dublin to home. Not a bad way to spend 15 days. And, it turns out, a rather convenient way to organize these particular posts.
So with apologies for what might come across as a tease (“You wrote this many fucking words and we’re still not to Scotland, you absolute turnip?!”) now that we’ve officially broken the curse, tomorrow we can finally get to the travel. Tomorrow we’ll hit London for 24 hours, and grab a train headed North along the coast to Edinburgh. Wednesday we’ll drive to Aberdeenshire, Inverness and Skye. Thursday will cover Oban, Crieff, and - briefly - Dublin. And Friday will wrap the week up with some broader general thoughts that didn’t have a place elsewhere.
So I’ll see you tomorrow, bright and early, in London - where we lay our scene.
