Euro-Trip Day #3 – St. Andrews Scotland

Day 3 of our trip saw us drive from Edinburgh to St Andrews Scotland. We picked up our Fiat 500x from the Alamo/Enterprise rent-a-car location at the Edinburgh airport (which we would recommend) and started the drive up to St. Andrews. It was a little bit of a crash course as it was Sunny’s first time driving a car on the left side of the road in a right side drive vehicle, but everything went swimmingly.

Along the way we saw beautiful landscapes dotted with thousands of sheep and a good number of wind turbines. This is our second trip to Europe and we were again surprised by how different the culture is – especially regarding energy and the environment.

We took a more scenic route from Edinburgh to St. Andrews and drove through a number of small, cute Scottish coastal towns. We happened upon this statue/carving at one of them.

Sheep everywhere!

This is the cute little car we rented – a Fiat 500x – for our drive around Scotland. Sunny is almost 6 foot 4, but found the car very comfortable and fun to drive. It was great on fuel economy and although the trunk (or boot) was small, we had no use for the backseat so we put our extra bags there.

Our first experience with “haggis” – deep fried haggis balls from Forgan’s in St. Andrews. It was nearly as bad as it is made out to be in North America – the ingredients may not sound appealing, but it tasted just fine!

After stopping for lunch we started to explore the city, including a walk down to the waterfront. Travel Bella made an appearance as we enjoyed the view.

The view of St. Andrews from the sea front.

St. Andrews is a very cute, quaint University town. It is where Prince William and Kate went to school and met – we even walked by the coffee shop they first started courting. The University is over 600 years old, and the campus is beautiful.

It is hard to believe that there is almost nothing in Albert more than 100 years old while you’re walking down walkways that were made over 600 years ago.

There is a castle in St. Andrews (and almost everywhere else you look in Scotland), and while it is mostly just the ruins it was still beautiful.

As we walked around some of the University of St. Andrews buildings, Jess commented on how Hogwarts-esque it felt.

We finished our afternoon at The Keys Bar in St. Andrews, which was named the 2014 Pub Of The Year in Scotland. It is a tiny little pub, but the owner/hostess/bartender was extremely nice and gave us a lot of good information on choosing a whiskey for Jess. Sunny stuck to beer.

We finished our day by making our way to the Fairmont St. Andrews where we spent the next two nights. Sunny had taken care of all the reservations and they had champagne and chocolates waiting for us to help us celebrate our anniversaries. The staff at the hotel were fantastic, and the hotel itself (fairly new) was also a wonderful place to stay. We would highly recommend it for anyone travelling to Scotland.