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Standing on the first tee at The Glen Golf Club in North Berwick, staring up at that intimidating climb to the opening green, I realized my grip on the driver felt different—calm and excited at the same time, maybe because it was my first tee shot on the links of Scotland. I couldn’t help thinking about the road we’d just driven. We’d rolled past Muirfield, The Renaissance Club, and North Berwick Golf Club’s West Links, with all the highlights of earlier Scotland trips dancing around in my head. Somewhere between that hill and those memories, my long‑running “To Golf or Not to Golf” question was finally tipping toward golf. And somehow, the first swing matched the moment: a drive right down the center, sitting happily in the short grass.
Why This Wasn’t Just a Golf Trip
It was 100% a golf trip, but also much more. Four couples from River Glen in Fishers taking on The Glen, Carnoustie’s Burnside and Championship courses, St Andrews’ Castle Course, and—because we couldn’t help ourselves—Hillside Golf Club on the day between our Tuesday practice round and opening round at Royal Birkdale in Southport. Doug, Terry, Larry, and I have been golfing for years, and retirement at the end of 2022 only meant we started playing more. Five days of golf over seventeen days still left plenty of room for fun with our wives—and for one more reunion, with friends we’d met back in May 2022 in Rome, Mike and Sharon.
This Trip Didn’t Actually Start With a Tee Time
This trip didn’t actually start with a tee time; it started years ago, with a handful of small trips and oddball events that slowly pushed us here—our own butterfly effect, measured in pub tables, plane tickets, and scorecards.
If you trace it backward, it doesn’t really begin when Doug announced in the spring of 2025 that we should “book Scotland.” It begins in the trail of small decisions that didn’t look important at the time. A pub table we squeezed around in Rome in 2022, a drive past courses we didn’t play on earlier visits to Scotland and England, one more “why not?” stamped on the calendar for an event trip instead of staying home—none of those felt like turning points. But taken together, they kept nudging us a few degrees closer to the idea that, of course, we would someday stand on a tee at The Glen, with scorecards in our pockets and the home of golf just down the road.
The Trip itself – Places, golf, people
The Places
Edinburgh is where the true vacation starts. Doug and Tia and Larry and Donna and Terry and Barb warmed up in London, but Katy and I decided to join the fun north of the capital. We spent twenty‑four hours in York before meeting everyone on the train to Edinburgh, and from past visits and what friends had said, we were genuinely excited to get even that one day in York. We stayed in a very cool four‑room hotel above the Golden Fleece, a timber‑framed inn first mentioned in 1503 and happily marketed as York’s most haunted pub, and spent the evening wandering the city centre and riverfront asking ourselves why we don’t do more one‑day detours like this.
Four nights in Edinburgh is always too short, but I’ll take any time. Edinburgh is my favorite city in the world that I know. Katy and I have been there many times, including our honeymoon, and most recently in 2024, when we spent a month in the city. On this trip, we split time between old favorites like Dishoom and The Ship on the Shore and a handful of new places, all within easy reach of the links country we’d come for. We even had a special treat when Tom Kitchin stepped out of the kitchen to say hi in his restaurant—a tiny, unexpected moment that made the city feel smaller and more familiar than any postcard. Moments like that—an unexpected hello from a chef we admire in a city we already love—are part of why Edinburgh keeps pulling us back.
Five nights in St Andrews doubled the total nights we’d ever spent there. Most of our St Andrews memories before this were day trips—walks along the Old Course, quick coffees, a few stolen hours watching other people play. This time, three of the five days were golf days, which meant the girls had room to go on a boat trip and explore nearby towns and Dundee while we worked through Carnoustie and the Castle Course. The non‑golf days were finally ours to wander the streets, linger at the edge of the Old Course at dusk, and soak in the “home of golf” instead of just sprinting through it. Safe to say St Andrews stole everyone’s heart this time around—and by the end of the week, we all wanted to come back.
Our last stop was four nights in Liverpool. We really haven’t spent much time there—two nights in 2015 and a day trip back in 2000—so I was looking forward to exploring the city a bit more. In reality, every day was spoken for: a practice round, a day at Hillside, then the opening round at Royal Birkdale during Open week. Liverpool became less about sightseeing and more about gathering—most memorably at The Restaurant Bar & Grill, where our group and Mike and Sharon finally sat down together and connected this trip back to that Rome 2022 table. Our location near Mathew Street made it easy to soak up a bit of the city’s musical history, and the fact that we got to eat at the newly opened Dishoom in Liverpool was a special surprise. Castle Street, with its run of restaurants, converted bank buildings, and alfresco tables, has become one of the favorite dining streets I know in the world.
The Golf
We’d built the itinerary around places we loved, but if I’m honest, the spine of the trip was always going to be the golf.
The Glen Golf Club – North Berwick
They say The Glen has been reshaped over the years with input from Old Tom Morris and now offers wide, forgiving fairways with playable rough—especially welcoming for a first round of the trip. We were excited to have it as our kickoff day: 36 holes, 18 walking and then 18 in a buggy (known as a cart back home). The drive along the coast past other legendary courses had already woken us up to the views we were about to enjoy—holes hugging the clifftops with big sweeps across the Firth of Forth and out to Bass Rock. The weather was overcast but in the upper 60s, mercifully dry, with winds I quickly learned to respect—steady around 20 mph, gusting up to 45—”a gentle breeze,” as the locals might say. This was exactly the kind of Scotland golf my mind had been planning for: beautiful, a little wild, and more than happy to remind you who’s in charge. After 36 holes, I think the wind might have won, but I walked off the last green grinning anyway.
Carnoustie’s Burnside
Despite the modest yardage, Burnside is no warm‑up loop. It served up some of the longest par 4s I’ve ever played, and it borrows several of Carnoustie’s iconic holes while sharing Barry Burn crossings and that same rolling links terrain with its famous neighbor. The green complexes and bunkering are clever rather than cruel, which makes it feel like a course that wants you to have a good day if you pay attention. It was strangely calming to watch the trains fly by as we walked the links, a reminder that this brutal little corner of golf lives right next to everyday life. After our windy opening rounds, Burnside gave us a different face of Scotland golf: clear skies, almost no wind, and sun in the mid‑70s. I didn’t exactly light up the scorecard, but the course felt fair and playable, and we walked off smiling and in search of a pint—which is about all you can ask for from a round at Carnoustie.
Carnoustie’s Championship
The Championship course is where the gloves come off. The fairways are narrow, and the bunkers are deep enough that you don’t just lose strokes—you start to question your will to keep grinding. By this point in the trip, we were used to seeing bunkers and getting out of them more often than not, but Carnoustie still felt like it had one more gear. The closing stretch is every bit as legendary as advertised: five finishing holes with four long par 4s that seem to get longer the more you stare down the fairway. The wind had been asleep most of the round and then woke up for the last five, just to show us how tough this place can be. It was my first time ever taking a caddie, and between his guidance and another otherwise perfect weather day, we all managed to hold our own and, for the most part, stay clear of the truly enormous bunkers—aside from a few deliberate photo ops in the epic ones. Walking off, I was thrilled to have done it, to finally add “Carnoustie Championship” to the list… but I’m still not sure whether I need to do it again.
St Andrews’ Castle Course
After two perfect days on Carnoustie’s mostly flat tracks, we were excited to get back to St Andrews and a seaside course we’d already admired on YouTube for its big, dramatic views. There was only one issue: fog. The night before, after driving back into town after conquering the Championship course, we could actually see the fog rolling in, street by street, like someone slowly erasing the horizon. By morning, you were lucky to see a hundred feet in front of you. Growing up in the Midwest, I assumed fog would burn off in an hour once the sun showed up—but Scotland didn’t get that memo.
By the time we arrived at the Castle Course, the fog was clearly going nowhere, and our choice was simple: play, or donate our funds and hope for better luck another year. So we played. Five and a half hours later—on a course that says a perfect‑day round should take about 4:45 to 5:15—we somehow made it through all 18 holes, feeling our way toward fairways and greens we could barely see. We could hear the ocean just yards off the edge of the course, but almost never saw it. The rain held off, but the air was so heavy that we finished soaked anyway and wondering how anything we owned was going to dry before Monday, when we headed for Liverpool.
Hillside Golf Club
Hillside was the special treat we didn’t think we’d get. Once we realized The Open was at Royal Birkdale, it hit me that friends we’d met in Rome in 2022—Mike and Sharon, massive Everton fans—live in the Liverpool area. I reached out to Mike to see if he wanted to join us in Scotland for golf, and he politely declined because of a family holiday. As plans unfolded, though, they were due back from their trip just as we were arriving in Liverpool, so a reunion dinner went on the calendar.
Originally, we assumed Hillside—sitting right next door to Royal Birkdale and sharing some facilities—would be closed to play during Open week. But as the clock ticked closer to the trip, a Wednesday tee time appeared between our Tuesday practice round and Thursday opening round, and Mike invited us to join him. It turned into one of those quietly perfect days. The weather was incredible again: almost cloudless sky, barely any wind, and a wonderfully varied track laid out alongside Royal Birkdale. Between a long, easy walk, stories of catching up, and taking in the course’s subtle beauty, we had the kind of round where the golf and the company kept trading places as the main event. By the time we made it back to our Liverpool Airbnb that evening, we couldn’t stop talking about the day.
Royal Birkdale – the 154th Open
Putting down our sticks, it was time to watch the professionals. Royal Birkdale offered one thing we hadn’t really seen in Scotland: dunes shaping nearly every hole. The players walked their rounds on beautifully prepared fairways, but spectators had to climb and descend the dunes all day, which made it a very different kind of links experience. It wasn’t an easy walk, and we were grateful the weather was beyond beautiful both days—clear, bright, and kind enough to let us focus on golf instead of survival.
We navigated most of the holes, saw the top players, and found ourselves reliving moments from those enormous bunkers and tough approaches we’d just faced over the previous two weeks. By the time we stepped off near the 18th on Thursday night, the weight of the whole experience had settled in. It was hard to believe that this trip—once an idea that felt so far away—was already winding down. Physically, it was almost over; mentally, it wasn’t going anywhere.
The People
Somewhere between The Glen’s cliffs, Carnoustie’s bunkers, the fog at the Castle Course, Hillside’s sunshine, and the dunes at Birkdale, I realized the scorecards were only half the story. The other half was the people walking those fairways with us. If the butterfly effect is about small moments shaping big outcomes, then the real story of this trip lives with the friends who kept saying “yes” along the way.
If you’ve read my work, you know I’m all about the people, and this trip is no different.
From Fishers, we had Doug and Tia, married for over forty years, world travelers and natural planners. They’d been to Edinburgh and Liverpool before, but not to St Andrews, so watching them see the “home of golf” for the first time was its own quiet joy. Terry and Barb, married a month after Katy and me back in 1992, are also world travelers and have no trouble finding fun wherever they land; this was their first time in Scotland, and they treated each stop like a fresh stage to explore. Larry and Donna, the “newlyweds” of the group, kept us on our toes with a surplus of energy and a willingness to wander. It was Larry’s first trip to the UK, while Donna—thanks to her years as a traveling nurse—has already seen more corners of the world than most of us.
Finally, we have Mike and Sharon. Their part of the story is why I love travel and meeting new friends. Mike is a huge Everton supporter and a sports fan in general, and ever since we met them in Rome in 2022 we’ve stayed in touch—swapping messages during Colts and Everton seasons, keeping tabs on how our teams are suffering or celebrating. When I told Doug, Terry, and Larry that we were planning to have dinner with Mike and Sharon in Liverpool and that Mike would be hosting us at Hillside, they were a little skeptical; I didn’t have a single photo to prove this wasn’t an imaginary internet friend. But like so many things on this trip, one small decision to share a table in Rome turned into a much bigger chapter years later.
Watching The Open at Royal Birkdale with our own scorecards still drying in the Airbnb, it hit me that this trip wasn’t a one‑off—it was just the latest chapter in how we’ve quietly learned to travel for events.
We Travel for Events
For years, Katy and I traveled to see new places, history, and other cultures. When our daughter Shannon was studying at Royal Holloway in Egham, we decided to take advantage of visiting her and also step into a 500‑year tradition at the Burning Barrels of Ottery St Mary—and that’s when a new travel mantra arrived: let’s see events. Sometimes the event is the anchor for the whole trip—like flying over to watch the Colts play in Frankfurt or Berlin—and sometimes it’s something we discover along the way, like seeing The Proclaimers in their hometown of Edinburgh in July 2019, wandering into a summer church festival on the island of Milos, or catching Train at the Royal Albert Hall in 2024. Other times, the event is the entire reason for going, like returning to Royal Holloway so we could experience those Burning Barrels traditions properly, camping in Door County, Wisconsin, to watch the roofing of the goats, or the “why not?” that took us to Hans Zimmer in Hanover this past March.
This trip actually had three anchors that shaped its timing. The original plan was to get tickets to Wimbledon, spend a few days in London, head north to Edinburgh and St Andrews for golf, and then finish at The Open at Royal Birkdale. Everyone took a swing at Wimbledon tickets over the past year, but nothing stuck, and even Doug and Tia and Larry and Donna couldn’t beat the long “walk‑in” queues. So the plan flexed: we leaned into the weeks when golf made sense and began booking tee times in East Lothian, St Andrews, and Carnoustie. The Old Course never opened up for us, but it didn’t derail the trip. We did land tickets to The Open, which locked in our Liverpool dates and, with them, the flights home.
Once those anchors were set—golf weeks and The Open—everything else fell into place quickly. The cities, the rounds, the dinners, and even that Hillside day with Mike and Sharon all flowed out of a simple habit we’ve picked up over the years: circle a date, say “yes” to the event, and see what kind of story builds itself around it.
Small Moments, Big Ripples
Looking back, every little “why not?” was just another flap of the wings, the quiet butterfly effect that carried us from that crowded pub table in Rome to a tee box at The Glen. The big pieces of this trip are easy to name: The Glen, Carnoustie, St Andrews, Hillside, Royal Birkdale, The Open. But the parts that made it possible were smaller and much easier to miss in the moment. Doug’s spring 2025 “let’s book Scotland” text landed on years of casual day trips to St Andrews and Edinburgh, each one nudging the idea of playing there from fantasy to plan. A pub table in Rome in 2022 turned into friends in Liverpool, a mid‑Open Wednesday at Hillside, and a dinner where worlds overlapped. A November night at the Burning Barrels, goats on a roof in Wisconsin, Hans Zimmer in Hanover, Colts games in Frankfurt and Berlin, and a handful of Proclaimers and Train shows taught us that saying “why not?” to events usually leads to better stories than staying home.
None of those felt like turning points when they happened. They were just good nights, good trips, good conversations. But taken together, they were our version of the butterfly effect: a chain of small, mostly ordinary decisions that eventually added up to seventeen days of golf, trains, dinners, and dunes, with the home of golf sitting in the middle of it all.
If you’ve read this far, you probably have your own version of this story—small choices or events that quietly steered you toward a trip, a person, or a place that now feels inevitable in hindsight. Maybe it’s a game you keep promising yourself you’ll see in person, or a city you keep visiting without really knowing why. The fun part is that you don’t have to know which wing‑flap will matter while it’s happening. You just have to keep saying “yes” often enough that, one day, you find yourself on a first tee somewhere thinking, “of course we ended up here.”
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