Tinder & Trains: a Travel Diary

I recently returned from a week of adventuring around Scotland. When people ask me why I wanted to visit Scotland, I tell them it’s because I have a propensity for dilapidated old castles and people using “wee” seriously in conversation. Really, though, Scotland’s been at the top of my travel bucket list for a long time. I’m really only a very small part Scottish, but I happen to have an incredibly Scottish last name. And thus, I fully embraced my heritage as a member of Clan MacLellan and boarded a plane with excitement and anticipation.

Eventually, we arrived in Edinburgh, where we would spend the next two nights. Our hostel was small and quaint, full of the usual characters you find in a hostel: lots of hipstery travelers, that one girl who stays in watching Netflix all day, the old man who can definitely afford to stay in a hotel and it’s unclear why he’s there.

I had made a Tinder account explicitly for this trip. I do not otherwise do Tinder, primarily because I can’t think of something funny or clever enough for my bio. But it seemed important for me to swipe in Scotland as part of my plan to meet my future Scottish husband.

Here are some Scottish Tinder Take-Aways:

1. 70% of them were named Callum. Who knows why. Some of them were named Ali, which, I’m told, is short for Alistair.
2. Kilts were a surprising turn-on. I pretty consistently swiped right for kilts. There’s just something about tartan, ya know?
3. U.K. bois aren’t very forward. Out of almost fifty matches, only two messaged me. One of them was kind of a gremlin, and one of them was very nice—like almost too nice. Until he asked me how long I was going to be in Scotland for and I told him I was sadly leaving that very day. As soon as that message was received he immediately unmatched me. So fuck you, Callum.

We did other things in Scotland besides Tinder, though, I swear. We saw the city, we took an incredibly nausea-inducing bus up to the Highlands, where I saw what has to be the most beautiful landscape on this Earth. We saw a lot of live music, tried to wear Toms on the slick Scottish hills and slipped and fell like cartoon characters on banana peels, watched some wild Scottish dating shows and BBC dramas, and ate a lot of fish and chips.

On our second-to-last day in Scotland, we took the train down from Inverness to Edinburgh, where we would be flying out of the next day. This train was packed. There were people standing in the aisles and beside the doors and every seat was taken. And the weirdest part about train travel in Scotland is that the train basically becomes a rolling pub. The girls behind us had carried on a four-pack of Coors Light and were each on their second bottle, gossiping about a mutual friend. There was a crowd down the aisle who had a twelve-pack of Budweiser. There were guys standing just a few rows away who were mixing Jack and Coke into Solo cups, I kid you not. One of them raised his red plastic cup and winked at me as he took his first sip.

Rolling back into Edinburgh on that final night felt oddly like coming home, though we’d only been away for a few days, and only spent a couple of nights there in the first place. The next morning we boarded a plane that would take us home-home. By the time we got back to Providence, we had been traveling for fifteen straight hours. It was only 10PM EST, but 3AM Scotland time. We got take-out from Yan’s and I went back to my room and ate an entire order of pad Thai by myself in probably under seven minutes before falling asleep. My wee Scottish adventure had come to an end.

Images via Elizabeth McClellan.