We Didn’t Expect Scotland to Look Like This! | North Coast 500 FIRST IMPRESSIONS 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Scotland has been on the top of our travel bucket list for years and today we're finally beginning one of the world's most famous road trips, the North Coast 500. Over the next 10 days we'll drive more than 500 miles around Scotland's rugged northern coastline, discovering ancient castles, hidden beaches, towering sea cliffs, highland cows, puffins, and some of the most breathtaking scenery we've ever experienced. But before all that, our adventure begins as a lonely lighthouse overlooking the North Sea. Good morning from Scotland. We are so stoked to be here. Over the next 10 days we're going to be road tripping the NC500. This has been one of the things that I've been looking forward to the most since we got to Europe. We love traveling by train but there's just something about the freedom of having a rental car that just makes me so happy. Okay, the Tarbet Nest Lighthouse is one of over 200 lighthouses around Scotland's coast. It is 41 meters high and I love the look of like the iconic red and white stripes. I feel like we hardly ever see like that coloring on a lighthouse. I love it especially since all of the yellow flowers are in bloom. What a beautiful first stop though. We're so lucky with the weather, the blue skies, are you yellow. It's gonna be an awesome road trip. The first of many PB&Js. So I used the banana to stir the peanut butter, which you can see some leftover, and chips to spread it. Cheers you guys. Very resourceful. Uh-huh. And look at this. What do you got down there? Liz says we decided to make the glove compartment our snack drawer since our car is so tiny. Look at that, all kinds of goodies in there. I was going for some peanut M&Ms. You guys like our car? A little, what is it, a Fiat 500, a little red whatever. I don't know anything about cars. So this is our little car for the next 10 days. So tiny, perfect for these narrow roads. We made it to Dunrobin Castle. It's so beautiful. It's like a fairy tale castle with the little spirally uh spires. What are the cones on top called? Anyway, they look like fairy tale castle. I just read online that this castle is the oldest continuously inhabited house or living establishment in Scotland. Somebody lives there? I think so. Wow that's nice. It's it's crazy, but also like parts of the castle date back to the 1200s. We're not going inside because it is 16 pound 50. Did I say 16 pound 50 or 16 50 pound? First time, first one I think. First day here, I don't know. Which is actually a pretty good price. That's not bad. Yes, the castle's massive, the grounds look beautiful, but unfortunately we're just not going to pay to go inside, but it's absolutely stunning from the outside. It is. We just made it to Carn Llyod. I tried to look up the pronunciation on Google, but my internet's not working right now, but these are brocks. So apparently brocks are among Scotland's most impressive prehistoric buildings. These tall round stone houses date back from 2300 to 1900 years ago and are mainly found in north and west Scotland. You can see like this how there used to be like these huge cylinder like type houses. There's over 200 sites in Scotland and some that are like just so ruinous they can't really identify them, but this is one of the ones that's like been excavated for people to explore. It's pretty cool and it has, look at these views, and it was, this one was owned by a very wealthy family, they think. We did talk to a local earlier and she said that these beautiful yellow flowers are called gorse. She said it differently like gorse, but they're gorse flowers. They're so full right now. They're so full and lush and pokey. They're pokey, but they're beautiful. So we're passing through Broar now and last night at our airbnb our host recommended an ice cream spot here. So while we're here I guess we have to get an ice cream. Honeycomb is amazing. I gotta get that. Nice meeting you guys. Thank you. Nice meeting you sir. Raspberry and cream and honeycomb and the honeycomb has like these little crunchy sugars in it. So good. So good and you got honeycomb and mini egg, mini cream egg. Chocolate mini egg. Chocolate mini egg. Something like that. We don't know anything. First day. First day here. We met a few locals in this town who were super sweet and gave us some suggestions. One guy who was drinking a coffee, he goes there every day, he's like you gotta try the coffee. So we got an americano which really hits the spot, but the two girls working there and the gentleman as well were all so kind and sweet and yeah. So far the people have been very very friendly and outgoing too. So I didn't mention how amazing the ice cream was. Best ice cream cone I've ever had. It was a Biscoff cone with like covered in nuts and stuff. Oh it was amazing. Also in town though or right near town there's a distillery you can check out that has amazing reviews online too. If you're a whiskey drinker or staying in town obviously we can't because we're still driving, but lots of cool stuff to do. It's a beautiful place with very nice people. Wouldn't be a bad spot to stay too. We made it to the Bad Bay Historical Clearance Village. This place is really interesting because a clearance village is like whenever these villagers lived inland and the landlords wanted to kind of like evict them to make their land into like for like sheep pastures, they evicted them over to the coast so like cleared them out so a clearance village. So they were forced to live on the side of these cliffs and they were farmers and then there's obviously no farming land over here and so it's like the remnants of a little village on the cliff side. I just read a sign that said legend has it that they had to like tether their livestock and their children so that they wouldn't be blown away. Yeah it doesn't look like it today but the conditions here are super harsh. The land you can't go on and it's super high winds but feels great today. Yeah they were like beware of the high winds. I'm like we have perfect luck and there was like a monument that was put up for the villagers. There was never more than like 70 people who lived here at like its highest point but it's still an interesting bit of history. Aren't you cute? Aren't you? Our first highland cows. Look at this setting you guys. The green the blue and these cows are so chunky and hairy with their horns. They're so large even the normal cows though are just huge. They look like rhinos. The cows are eating some good grass here because they're huge. But yeah our first highland coos. Check out this amazing sunset. What a perfect way to end our first day here. We just arrived to the town of Wick. We're staying in this little hotel behind us here. Costs just over a hundred dollars a night which is a pretty great deal. More great sights and views to show you guys tomorrow. Good night. Good morning you guys. It's day two on the NC500 here in Scotland. Last night we stayed in this small town called Wick. We just picked up our to-go coffees from Wicker's World. The ladies were so sweet who worked in there. But check out this beautiful harbor behind us. Today we're gonna head back south a little bit, hit up some spots we didn't go to yesterday and then continue ahead north. Excited? I'm so excited. We have beautiful weather again today. We have coffee. Yeah I'm really excited. I'm just so happy to be out in nature and road tripping again. I love road tripping. I'm crying. I'm confident coming out here and then as soon as I need to go back. Oh my god I'm scared. My knees are shaking you guys. That is one way to get your adrenaline going this early in the morning. There's more than three feet of land on both sides of me. These steps are so cool. I'm so glad we came back for this. It finally feels like the Scottish Highlands because these huge drop-off cliffs. Wow we just finished up here at I think it's called Walygo Steps, whatever it's called. You definitely have to make this one of your stops. So far this is my favorite place we have stopped at. It is so dramatic from the top and then when you walk down the steps from the bottom and then this whole thing if you're courageous enough to go out there. Wow. Maybe not with high winds. Don't do it. Yeah don't do it with high winds and don't do it if you're too scaredy because that was really scary. But yeah great stop. Okay that was spectacular. Our next stop we're heading to a castle I believe again. It's supposed to be right on the coast. It looks amazing. We just made it to the parking lot of the castle that we're going to go see and it turns out that if you go just a little bit the other way there's a lighthouse and coffee cakes. That sounded very enticing to us so we're going to go see that and then go back and explore the castle. Various things he was doing and decided to come up to Scotland where his family were from. This cake is gorgeous. It's a carrot cake. Luxury. A luxury. I knew it was something different. A luxury carrot cake. So what does that mean? It's just thicker, deeper, more icing, more beautiful, elegant, dense carrot cake and a couple of coffees. Just what we needed for a little afternoon pick-me-up. That looks amazing. Oh my gosh that's divine. That was so good. You can pick out your own treat. Thank you. Thank you for stopping by. The lady at the little coffee stand. She was super sweet. She was so adorable and sweet. She told us that she saw puffins and orcas last week and I knew it was puffin season and a puffin has been on my bird watch list for a very long time and so I'm very excited that we're in puffin territory now so I've got to constantly be on the lookout. Gotta get lucky. So the lady who worked the coffee shop, she gives the top tip instead of just walking directly on the road to the castle, you can actually from the lighthouse take the long way. It's like a 40 minute walk and you're just walking through these grasslands. You're right on top of these cliffs and the views are just spectacular. The investigative journalism is in. We have a feather. What does that mean? A puffin feather. They're here. Sam, you're breaking the rules. Little sequence of Sammy on the case. We do. Let's go all the way up to the beach. Instead of saying you know? Yeah. It's a grassy beach. It's a greech. I'm gonna go to the greech today. Doesn't quite sound as nice as I'm going to the beach. Come see. Come see. Come see. The puffin. You know what its nickname is? What? A Tammy Nori. Tammy. Tommy and Sammy combined is a Tammy. You're silly. Or you could call it a sea cocky but that's not as cute. What a cool castle right here on the water. Gets great views of the sea but I gotta say the highlight was the hike walking along those cliff edges seeing all the different types of birds. Another fantastic stop here on our road trip. We just made it to Duncan's V lighthouse. This is our third lighthouse on our NC500 trip. There's, I think I said this earlier in the video, there's over 200 along this route so our third one. There's also a really cool one out there on a little island. How's this background? Amazing. Does it look like I'm in a screensaver? Kind of. Yeah. This was um these are called Duncan's V stacks so it's just a short what do you say 15 minute hike down from the Duncan's V lighthouse. There's supposed to be like some bird inlets that we can walk in there and maybe look for some puffins. So we saw the puffin. It is so cute. We just saw one singular puffin. He was just like perched up on a ledge just kind of like burrowed. He had his beak like tucked under his wing for the longest time. I actually saw the bird and didn't realize it was a puffin. How'd you find it detective? I know the detective didn't do her job very well. A lady was like oh that's a puffin and I was like oh why didn't I check it out further? But so cute. They're so cute but then he eventually he got up and started walking around and we saw his beak and very cute. They're so plump. A little bit smaller than I was expecting. We made a special stop here at the John O'Groats sign. We had to get our selfie with the sign behind us because we went from land to end to land end. I'm just joking. The only reason we came here is they have a brewery and I want to try a beer. Oh what a sweetie. So I just got a pale ale. It's called Manahoy. Cheers you guys. Perfect stop over for this especially. I'm gonna get an Americano to counteract the beer. How cool is this? Most northerly point of mainland Britain. And the Dunnett Head Lighthouse and a beautiful view. This is our cozy inn that we booked for two nights here on the NC500. It's a very nice spacious cozy room and have a restaurant on site where we made reservations for dinner. So for dinner tonight I got the venison casserole. I think with vegetables and like a Yorkshire pudding. Is that right? Yeah. I'm not sure what that means. Sammy got the lamb tagine which looks also very good. And we got a local IPA which is like kraken IPA which is fitting too. Cheers you guys. Better way to end the day than going for a dip. It is 56 degrees out right now. I'm assuming the water is pretty cold this far north. Only in Scotland once. Oh even the sand's cold. That was colder than I thought. Talk about a quick dip. That's it for today you guys. Great way to end it. Only one on this beach. It's almost 8 p.m and the sun's still out. It's pretty fantastic. See you guys tomorrow.