Keep your eyes peeled for brown-and-white signs.


As in the US, there does seem to be some consistency in signposting government-owned or sponsored tourist destinations in these colors. You’ll be surprised how fast your reticular activating system will catch on; you’ll be an expert at spotting brown-and-white signs, no matter how small, by the time you fly back across the pond.

That said, many of the homes, castles, and museums on your must-see list may well be privately owned. If so, their signs will look however they jolly well please and will be posted just about anywhere. (See Tip #3 and #4.)

Get used to rubber-necking it. When you see the back of a sign on the opposite side of the road, as soon as you pass it, quickly whip around and read it.

We learned this the hard way on our first trip to Scotland. We must’ve driven the same road five times before we noticed one teeny little sign pointing the way. We’ve encountered this phenomenon many times. Don’t know if it’s misguided thriftiness, careless maintenance, or what.

Doesn’t matter: your job is to pay attention to ALL signs – the ones facing you and the ones facing the oncoming traffic. A sign facing oncoming traffic may be the only sign you’re going to find telling you where Castle —– is located.

Streets change names.


If you live on our East Coast in an older city or town that sort of evolved higgledy-piggledy over the two or three centuries of our nation’s brief history, then you’re already accustomed to this.

We live in the West, where most towns were carefully platted in nice, neat squares. Newly annexed properties and subdivisions are very carefully, for the most part, mated into the original town or city plan. Very seldom do streets change names in our neck of the woods.

You can imagine our surprise when we kept coming across new names every other block or so. Apparently, in the UK and Europe, this is rather common. Streets, especially in Edinburgh, can – and do – change names A LOT. Look sharp. As some streets intersect others at odd angles, we assumed, when we found a different street name at the next block, that we must’ve unknowingly left the street we meant to stay on. Most of the time, we hadn’t; the street had just changed names.

We haven’t used GPS in the UK yet, so I’m not sure how accurate GPS devices are, given the multiple intricacies of older UK cities. If you have, we’d like to hear about it.

. . . especially when information hasn’t exactly been forthcoming.

My husband and I have met and known more Scots than your average American tourist. We’ve toured Scotland 17 weeks altogether. We’ve stayed in 15 (that I can remember) private homes and met many of the owners. While shopping for groceries, petrol, and trying to work out the washer-dryer thing, we’ve met their neighbors, relatives, friends, and fellow villagers. We’ve struck up countless conversations on trains, waiting in the ubiquitous queue, in shops, on great-house tours, while staying in B&Bs, you name it.

What have I learned? The Scots are . . . a lot like us. Much more so than the English. That may be because so many Scots immigrated to this country that our collective psyche has been subtly, yet deeply, shaped by this proliferation of Scottish descendants. (Read Born Fighting to see what I mean. James Webb says it much better than I ever could, so I won’t even try to paraphrase him.)

Because of all this immigration, many Scots have a built-in affinity for us, viewing us kindly as American cousins they haven’t yet met. They’ve also heard the stories, handed down by previous generations, of family members who immigrated to the U.S. and – sure enough – made good on the American Dream.

They like us. They really do.

When someone likes you, it’s easy to communicate with them. Good news for American tourists: most Scots want to tell us any and every thing they know about our shared heritage – Scotland’s wonderful country, history, and culture. And if you’re the least bit enthusiastic, they’ll tell you things they don’t know, making it up as they go – if you happen to be conversing in a pub.

Now, as any thinking person will realize, I’ve been speaking in generalities. There will always be the odd man out. And for some quirky, mysterious reason, the exceptions to the rule about friendly, talkative Scots seem to show up from time to time as . . . tour guides.

Yes, well. I don’t understand it either. My best guess is that those employed by the National Trust of Scotland and Historic Scotland to hire guides for their bazillion properties must be very busy indeed. I’m quite certain they don’t intentionally hire someone so ill-suited to the job. I think they’re just distracted – not entirely paying attention – when they hire the people who will be paid to give out information about their properties. No other way to account for the occasional hiring of someone who isn’t terribly fond of parting with knowledge . . . or good will . . . or even a tepid smile.

I’m just telling you to be forewarned. You will eventually encounter one of these types, not very often, but enough that you need to be prepared. We’ve toured literally hundreds of sites, and here’s the score.

Friendly, Informative Scottish Tour Guides: 544
Unfriendly, Tight-mouthed Scottish Tour Guides: 2

Which, when you think about it, is a w-a-a-a-y better score than we’d have here in the States.

Here’s how you cope, which is not to say it’s how I coped. When it’s obvious, by their terse one-liners, they’re not about to give you answers to your innocent questions, stop. Like an idiot, I just kept asking questions, thinking maybe he didn’t understand my American accent or maybe if I just demonstrated my sincere interest, he’d relent. I persisted in this till hubby yanked me into the next room and hissed, “SHUT UP.” You, profiting from my faux pas, will know to stop after the second rebuff.

And you’ll also know – because I’m telling you – that all is not lost. The unfortunate hiring of Mr. Tight Lips does not mean you will never get your questions answered. No, no, no. Just keep your eyes peeled for that very discreet rotation of the tour guides from one room to the next. (NTS and HS do this, I suspect, to ensure their guides are cross-trained and to alleviate their boredom.) Once you see the changing of the guard, just cycle back to the room where your questions went stubbornly unanswered and lo and behold, you’ll find a fresh, new face. And I’ll just bet she’ll be delighted to answer your question about the type of wood in the great hall’s overmantel or the origin of celluloid toiletry set of the eighth laird’s wife.

I can’t tell you how close I came to mailing the scathing letter I wrote to the NTS about a tour guide at Falkland Palace. In the end, I dumped my letter in the dust bin, figuring one so ill-equipped for a job wouldn’t last long – with or without my indignant letter. There are just some things you don’t do, in the interest of downplaying the Ugly American reputation. This was one of them. Let the Scots complain about their own, I figure – and you may want to follow suit.

Skip the glitzy tour books.

Almost every great house and castle worth its salt has compiled a rather impressive, glossy, full-color booklet for which they charge the equivalent of a U.S. hardback book. While you’re there, under the spell of that magical place, it’s hard to resist the temptation to buy one of these marketing marvels. “After all,” you reason, “it’ll help us get so much more from the experience.”

Maybe. If the glossy book is about your clan castle or has anything to do with your Scottish or Celtic heritage, buy it. In fact, buy everything you can get your hands on in that gift shop. It’ll easily fit into your luggage because you, smart traveler that you are, aren’t buying a bunch of tchotchkes to lug home. You may have a very hard time finding such site-specific information elsewhere (even on the Net) and if you do, you may have to pay dearly for someone else’s incurred expense of shipping it across the pond and paying duties.

But if you have no personal connection to the site, I advise skipping the glitzy booklet. If you’ve done much research before you left home or you’ve accessed the Net each night before the next day’s touring, you may already know the bulk of what that glossy bit of fluff has to say. If your trip is very lengthy, you may (as we often do) find you can barely absorb the facts related by the tour guides and the information paddles in each room. Any information beyond that is overload.

Here’s our rule-of-thumb. We gladly accept any free maps, flyers, and handouts and use these as we tour the site. We scan the pricey, glossy booklets after the tour, looking for anything that wasn’t covered in the tour or free handouts, or that we don’t remember reading online. We ask ourselves, “Will we need to know this bit of arcane information?” Sometimes our answer is “yes” because of what we do – paint and sell Scottish artwork online and supply viewers with pertinent history and background about it. If you’re not in the same (or a related) business, you need to know way less than we do. If we skip these expensive books most of the time, you definitely should.

Long before we ever began traveling abroad, some well-traveled friends were taking us on an informal travelogue of their recent trip to the U.K. By the stack on the dining table, it appeared they’d bought every booklet available at every place they’d visited. I asked them a question about something in one of the books. They didn’t know. “Oh, we never read it.” “Not even when you were there?” I asked. “Nope. No time,” was the response. “How about when you arrived home?” “Nope. Trip was over, and we forgot all about it.”

Lesson learned – and for once – not the hard way! Skip the fancy-dancy guidebooks.

Buy NO gifts.

What?! No gifts for Sis . . . Mom . . . the kids. . . the grandkids?? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

Again, this is a lesson hard-learned. During our first two trips, we agonized over what to get various family members. In fact, I’d be embarrassed to tell you how much effort, time, thought, and money we put into this activity. Were those carefully bought gifts appreciated? They were not.

Why? Here’s our best guess: our family members didn’t go to Scotland (nor, apparently, do they particularly care to). When we buy souvenirs on holiday, we have sights, sounds, tastes, and smells that are part and parcel of those souvenirs. A glance at my pewter and copper brooch transports me back to a Canterbury museum gift shop on a cool fall day – and all the other sites we saw that day. If I were to give that brooch to any family member, she’d have no memories of anything so pleasurable tied to it. And that’s true for just about any souvenir you’d care to name. A souvenir’s value-add (and sometimes its only value) is the buying event itself – in a unfamiliar place – and the memories that event can trigger.

Don’t believe me? Okay, what did you do with the little gewgaw Aunt Laura brought you from Germany? Or the hand-carved knick-knack your friend hauled back from India? I’ll bet you graciously thanked them and promptly relegated these items to the back of the odd-sock drawer – after displaying them for a few days or weeks. Or, gasp, re-gifted them. You ungrateful wretch!

No, I take that back. It isn’t that you’re ungrateful or that our recipients were ungrateful. It’s simply that other people’s trip souvenirs can’t mean much to you because you weren’t there. You didn’t haggle with the shop-keeper. You didn’t watch the carver finishing up the details. You don’t remember the whiff of curry in the air while you paid your rupees for the silver bracelet.

If you need to thank someone for walking the dog, watering the plants, etc., back home while you were traveling, that’s handled easily enough; buy something you know they really like after you’re back in the States. Save your money and your time while on your trip. Remember other people didn’t take your trip and souvenirs you collected on your trip will mean very little to them.

Here’s my one exception to this tip: when someone has out-and-out asked for a very specific item, by all means, buy it for them if you can find it.

Limit each traveler to the amount of luggage he/she can easily carry.

For us, it’s two pieces each, period. A 22” x 14 x 9” main piece of luggage that, on international flights, could be carried on if we chose. But we don’t. We each wheel that sucker up to the luggage check-in and let the airlines deal with it, especially if we have very many connecting flights. Add to that a small carry-on daypack for each of us, which can be zipped to the top of our main piece of luggage. That’s it. Whether we’re touring for two weeks or five, these are the only two pieces of luggage we each take. No more!

And we do not overpack them. Three is the magic number: three pairs of slacks, three long-sleeve shirts, three short-sleeve shirts, three pairs of socks, three sets of undies . . . . You get the picture. Throw in a wool sweater (possibly two), and you’re set. If you travel as we do – to see and learn about the culture – you don’t need a wide variety of clothing. One type of clothing will take you anywhere you want (or can afford) to go.  Three of each gives you one to wear, one that’s just been laundered, and one that’s airing out.

As you well know, airlines are piling on all kinds of extra charges for second bags, extra weight, etc. And since we’ve already ascertained you really don’t need that many clothes, it just makes financial sense to take as little luggage as possible, thereby incurring as few additional charges as possible. You can also save yourself tips by having luggage that you can obviously and easily carry by yourself. Struggling with a great whopper of a suitcase or corralling a multiplicity of bags and boxes is a sure-fire method for setting yourself up for a trip-full of porter tips.

Addendum: We have yet to try this, but I just learned this tip, which I’ll pass along. If you’re checking your main piece of luggage and are traveling with someone close – close enough to throw your undies together with no embarrassment – mix your clothes. Some of his trousers, some of your slacks, some of his shirts, some of yours, some of his undies, some of yours. You get the picture. If the airlines lose one piece of luggage and not the other, you’ll both have enough clothes to keep touring.

Take a little liquid laundry soap and be prepared to do hand laundry.

Here’s where I can get on a tear if I don’t watch myself. For reasons unfathomable to me, washers and dryers in the U.K. (and in all of Europe, from what I can tell), are absolutely pathetic. No matter how you slice it, one load in their teeny little front-loading washers (half a load in even an average-size U.S. washer) and anemic dryers takes three hours – minimum. That’s if you’re not drying jeans or towels; they take longer. Yes, longer, as in four hours.

Why? Why? Why? Most European countries have 240-volt electricity. They could toast their clothes in 10 minutes if they would just make their electrical engineers put on their little thinking caps. But I digress.

Now we’re back to the get-as-much-as-possible-from-our-trip mentality. We’re not babysitting laundry for four hours, period. You can if you want to, but we’ve found it’s quicker to hand-wash clothes as we go, let them line-dry while we’re out touring, and iron only if we really, really did a rotten job of pressing out the wrinkles by hand before hanging.

“Why not just drop them off at a local laundry?” you ask. That’s more time spent finding a reputable one and more than a little angst spent hoping they don’t turn my clothes into doll’s clothes. I simply don’t trust anyone else not to shrink my clothes. Since we pack very, very light, we can’t afford to have even one piece of our miniscule travel wardrobe taken out of the game.

Besides, it’s really not as bad as it sounds. First off, we’re not getting filthy digging ditches all day: we’re walking leisurely through world-class museums and historical houses. Secondly, it rarely gets what we’d call HOT in Scotland. Their summer “warm” is a wimpy 65 degrees. We just don’t get hot enough or exert enough effort to make it necessary to launder our clothes after every wearing, or even after every other wearing . . . or sometimes even after a whole week of wearing. Really.

After the first two trips, we realized that we Americans think we have to launder our clothes a lot more than is actually necessary. Taking a page from the previous generations on both sides of the pond – who managed to live without automatic washers and dryers somehow – we hang our clothes in such a way that they can air out each night or during the day while we tour. Guess what? A lot of odors dissipate after 24 hours of hanging time.

So lighten up, resign yourself to a little hand laundry, and skip the expense of paying someone else to launder your clothes. Try out the washers and dryers if you like. Who knows? You might get lucky. But if your experience is the same as ours, you won’t be unpleasantly surprised and you will be mentally prepared to suds up your duds in the sink.

(I don’t have to tell you, do I, that packing dry-clean-only clothes is about as un-thrifty a wardrobe choice as you could make?)

Pack what you can’t live without for two days in your carry-on.

This isn’t new information if you’ve done much traveling anywhere, but it’s particularly applicable to foreign travel. There’s just no accounting for where luggage ends up sometimes. There’s also no accounting for why it takes so long to catch up with you. There’s no accounting for how much out-of-pocket expense you might spend to replace your stuff. And there’s no accounting for the convoluted logic the airline will use to avoid reimbursing you for expenses you incurred when it lost your luggage.

This is another one of those hard-learned lessons. We left our coats, cameras, and toiletries in our checked luggage one trip – the only trip when our luggage’s ETA turned out to be a trifle later – as in two DAYS – than ours. We were dead in the water those two days of that trip – the shortest of all the trips we’ve taken, wouldn’t you know.

Lesson learned: pack anything that would be impossible or next-to-impossible to replace (my husband’s CPAP machine for his sleep apnea, for example) or anything that would be very expensive to replace (a whole cache of toiletries and medicines, digital camera, or smart phone). We each throw in an extra set of undies, jacket, hat, and camera in our carry-on daypack, and we’re set. We don’t miss a beat while the folks at American Airlines are trying to figure out where they sent our luggage.

Pack ALL the toiletries you’ll need.

This sounds more nitpicky than it actually is. I’m well aware that Rick Steves claims buying toiletries in a foreign country can be “fun.” I’d just like to point out that fun is a relative term, and my idea of fun must differ from Rick’s.

Here’s my main reason for advising you to avoid the toiletry aisle in Tesco; everything in it costs way more, even before the exchange rate. (I guess, without Walmart, there’s not enough competition to drive prices down to what we’re accustomed to paying in this country.) The frustration quotient is my second reason; it’s way higher than I’m comfortable with. Third reason? It’s wasted time.

I learned this the hard way a few years back. I’d run out of my three-in-one (cleaning-storing-wetting) contact lens solution. Replenishing it turned out to be a very expensive and time-consuming proposition – and this was in Scotland, where I could read the packages. If this had happened the year we toured Paris, I’d have been in trouble.

After running low on this and that during our first and second trips, I began to pay close attention to exactly how much of our toiletries we used. From then on, I was able to pack what we needed – and just a little bit extra. No more frantic shopping for contact lens solution. Just be sure you break everything into three-ounce or less containers; you know the drill.

Don’t forget OTC stuff either. With all the excitement of preparing for a four-week trip, not to mention the stress of getting four weeks’ worth of work done ahead of time, my body is usually run-down by the time we lift off and highly susceptible to whatever germs are zipping around the cabin. Not long after our arrival, I usually find myself with a first-class (unlike our cabin seating) head cold.

On our first trip, I made the mistake of packing minimal OTC medicines. After looking high and low for antihistamines, I asked a chemist (pharmacist) if antihistamines were unavailable in the U.K. No. Turns out they’re kept behind the counter, and you must ask for them. You don’t need a prescription. You just need to know to ask. When you’re jet-laggy and coming down with a whopper of a cold, your brain may not think to ask these sorts of questions. In fact, I find when I have any kind of physical problem, I don’t think too clearly.

Solution? Look in your medicine cabinet. Pack a week or two’s worth of every OTC that you normally keep in it. If it’s in there, you’ve obviously needed it. If you needed it in your own country, in your own home, going about your regular routine, there’s a 50-50 chance you just might need it on your holiday abroad. (We would all like to think not, but let’s be real.) Take it. It takes practically no room in your luggage. Then when your body begins to reel with a cold or flu . . . and your brain follows it, just go to your handy-dandy, home-away-from-home medicine kit; dose yourself; make an early night of it; and save yourself some time, frustration, and money. With any luck, you’ll feel way better the next day and won’t miss even one day of touring.

If you take any kind of prescription medication, you already know to pack enough for the entire trip, plus the prescription itself. If your copy is the predictably unreadable kind, ask your doctor’s office to e-mail a printed version for you to take – and tell them what country you’ll be visiting. They may know something you don’t about the pharmaceuticals available in that country and how lenient chemists can be – or not be. I’ve never had to track down a prescription medicine abroad, but I’ll bet it isn’t an easy process, especially if there’s a language barrier. And I’ll bet it isn’t an inexpensive process either.

Ever since 9-11, we’re all conditioned to the one-quart Ziploc bag routine, but I still pack our hanging toiletry bag. Why? Because spacious bathroom counters pretty much don’t exist in the U.K. – at least not in the places we’ve been. A savvy traveler told me this, as she sold me our toiletry bag 12 years ago: she said, “Trust me, honey, you’ll have to hang all your toiletries. There’s seldom anyplace to set them.” She was right. After we’ve made the airport security folks happy, I recombine all our toiletries and medicines into our one hanging toiletry bag, and we’re good for the remainder of our trip, or until we fly again.