tarlex

Would like thoughts on my semi planned intinerary.Husband and self, not interested in the larger towns as we have been there before.
Hire car Edinburgh and drive to Stonehaven (1st night) via St Andrews.
Drive via Aberdeen, Coastal villages and Inverness to Ullapool (2nd night) Told about a 4 hour drive.
Drive to Plockton via Applecross (3rd night)
Visit Skye. 4th night Glencoe (??)Suggestions(?) Thinking then 3 nights close to Glasgow but somewhere convenient for day trips in different directions.(Stirling and north, also Isle of Arran) city tour of Glasgow and there is an highland game one of the days. Will then train back to Heathrow.

yodababe

I guess my question is, do you want to do a straight-up driving tour, or do you want to actually see stuff in these places? If it is the latter, you haven't planned enough time for sightseeing.

Stonehaven is south of Aberdeen. To drive from there directly to Ullapool, on the motorway, with no stops, might take you 4 hours if you are lucky to avoid roadwork and commuter/tourist traffic. More likely it will take 5-6 hours. If you want to visit coastal villages on the way that will mean taking detours from the motorway to reach them via secondary roads, which makes the trip even longer.

The same can be said for the rest of your planned trip. You will be spending most of the time in the car if you try to fit this all in.

If I were you, I would think about what I really want to see and then plan a driving tour that centers on one region of Scotland--for example, the east coast. You could spend the day exploring Aberdeen, the next morning you could head up the Speyside whiskey trail with plenty of time to visit the coastal villages or archaeological sites or crafting centers and distilleries if you so chose--arrive in Inverness in late afternoon and spend the evening there, have a morning in Inverness and then up to Ullapool. That would leave you with a few days to either explore the area in greater depth or you could go over to Skye or Glasgow or whatnot.

Another suggestion is to fly to Aberdeen from London and rent your car from there. You would save yourself 2 days if you fly rather than take the train. Train travel in the UK is pretty expensive, you can usually find very good flight offers for in-country travel.

janisj

>>Drive via Aberdeen, Coastal villages and Inverness to Ullapool (2nd night) Told about a 4 hour drive.<<

Told by whom? Ignore whoever 'told' you that. It is more like a 6.5 hour drive w/o a single stop.

>>Visit Skye. 4th night Glencoe (??)Suggestions(?)<<

Applecross > exploring Skye > Glencoe is an enormous amount of territory . . . Just the drive from Applecross to Portree and on to Glencoe takes 6-7 hours w/o ANY exploring on Skye at all.

Then you want a single base for Stirling, Arran, and Glasgow . . . Where is the highland games??

I'm sorry, but none of your plan makes sense.

yodababe: >>To drive from there directly to Ullapool, on the motorway, with no stops, might take you 4 hours if you are lucky to avoid roadwork and commuter/tourist traffic. <<

There are no motorways anywhere on that route.

tarlex

Thank you both, thought I was being a little ambitious. Will now rethink the stops. I went by "google and michelin" for my travel times.

janisj

>>I went by "google and michelin" for my travel times.<<

Google is almost always wrong and for most on-line calculators you need to add 30% to 50% to the drive times. And in really rural areas w/ single track roads and free range livestock, or areas w/ lots of holiday traffic and caravans (travel trailers) you sometimes will need to add 75% or more.

dwdvagamundo

Bookmarking. Hope Janis and yodababe will critique rest of the suggested itinerary.