Route: Trieste → Milan → Glasgow → Edinburgh → Glasgow → Inveraray → Glasgow → Milan → Trieste.
Out of Trieste in the Golf 7 — same loyal box that hauled us through the Czech trip. Northern Italy unspools the same way every time: flatness, truck stops, the occasional improbable castle on a hill that nobody ever explains. Tolls: 31.90€. Some things have to be paid for regardless of where you're going.
Dinner at Samarcanda Restaurant + Lounge Bar (62.50€) — the last proper Italian meal before a week of deep-fried everything. Slept at an Airbnb in Via della Chiesa (136€), two minutes from the plate we'd just finished. Left the Golf at the Malpensa long-term lot (46€ for the trip), where it would sit for the week with the unruffled indifference of all inanimate things.
Breakfast at Malpensa (19.20€). Flight to Glasgow (~693€ total for the four of us, seat-adjacency tax included). Bus from the airport (12.68€), then a train east to Edinburgh (19.13€). The plan was simple and unambitious: drop the bags, start walking. First stop: Jackrabbit Coffee — a wake-up espresso with Bemby, because at a certain point you stop treating coffee as a drink and start treating it as a form of consent. Proper breakfast together ran 34.12€.
Through Charlotte Square, down into the Old Town, and onto the Royal Mile (+) — the spine of Edinburgh. It delivers exactly what it promises: bagpipes, tartan, bad tourist food, very tall stones, and an atmosphere you cannot manufacture. Every city wishes it had one of these. Most don't. Into the National Museum of Scotland — free and excellent. Two coffees at the café inside (8.07€) — museums being mostly artifacts and a warm place to sit. Then National Galleries of Scotland on the Mound. Stopped into the Warhammer store in Edinburgh afterwards; browsed, did not buy. The right book was apparently waiting for me in a different city. Dinner at Royal Durbar Indian Dining and Bar (141 £). Way better than the Thai later in the trip — no question. Cocktails at Lucky Liquor Co, a tiny speakeasy with a rotating menu of thirteen drinks, which feels like roughly the correct number of drinks for anywhere. Then a round of beers at The Oxford Bar, right next to our hotel — a small, stubborn pub that looks like it has seen every kind of evening and decided not to comment. Slept at Stewart by Heeton Concept Aparthotel Edinburgh (125€).
Breakfast at Cairngorm Coffee. Then we got serious. St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral — quiet and gothic, worth the detour, the kind of place that exists mostly so tourists can walk in and feel small for about four minutes. Then National Galleries Scotland: Modern One: I had come specifically for Ron Mueck's “A Girl,” which turned out to be in renovation. You travel across a continent for one thing and a curtain says no. You move on. Walked out to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh — green, calm, exactly what the middle of a trip asks for. Picked up a plain fridge magnet for my mom (9.17€) — somewhere out there, a refrigerator is quietly keeping score. Lunch at Rosa's Thai Edinburgh. Good. Not Indian-good.
Train to Glasgow (~95€ for our combined tickets). Dropped bags at Hotel Glasgow (390€ for three nights — the base we'd return to when the days emptied out). First stop in the evening: the Glasgow Warhammer, where I finally bought the Dark Angels supplement book (24.70€). Edinburgh's “no” quietly became Glasgow's “yes.” Then Escape Hunt Glasgow — the Excalibur room. We got out, as you do. The Pot Still (+) — a whisky bar with hundreds of bottles lined up behind the counter like patient monks, and pies that are a meal in their own right. Tried to follow it up with Shawarma King, which pulled down its shutters the moment we walked up, as if the universe had decided we'd had enough ambition for one evening. Settled for Five Guys (35.24€).
The big day. Out of the gate, no warm-up: Caledonia Road Church (+) — Alexander “Greek” Thomson's gutted shell of a neoclassical church, still holding its shape against the skyline. A building sometimes looks more like itself as a ruin than it ever did finished. Haunting, especially on a gray Glasgow morning. Proper breakfast at Cafe Gandolfi (+) (94.03€) — dark wood, stained glass, the best atmosphere of the trip, the kind of room that seems to have been designed a century ago specifically with us in mind. Medieval sweep: Provand's Lordship (Glasgow's oldest surviving house, 1471, standing there through little more than stubbornness), Glasgow Cathedral, The Glasgow Necropolis (Victorian city of the dead stacked on a hill, with a view better than most of the living ever get), then the small, quietly touching Friends of Glasgow Royal Infirmary Museum.
Espresso reset at Copperbox Coffee (2.50€). The group split: I took the Gallery of Modern Art (tried to see Michael McMillen's “Inner City” — also renovating. Renovations: 2, Samuel: 0), the others took the Riverside Museum. Regrouped at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (+) — enormous, free, one of the best civic museums anywhere. The organ recital alone justifies the walk. Tried Hunterian Museum — closed. Admired the building from outside, which is what buildings are mostly for. Matjaž and Emma peeled off hunting for a print to take home; they didn't find one. Most of what you want to bring back from a trip isn't made of paper. Bemby and I went back to the apartment to decompress, picking up souvenirs on the way (12.25€ — more gifts for the girlfriend). Regrouped in the evening at Escape Hunt Glasgow for round two — The Curse of the Pharaoh. We got out of this one too. Apparently we are the kind of people who, given a choice, will pay to be locked in a small room on vacation. Dinner at Guido's Coronation Restaurant, then on to the main event: Scotia Bar — trad live music, old wood, full crowd, the whole room leaning toward the fiddle the way plants lean toward a window. Two drink rounds (25€ + 23€). The Slovene verb of the night became “zljmpen” (= “drinking,” in our corrupted dialect). Successfully achieved. 88€ of Ubers over the day. Glasgow is walkable-ish, but not if you try to stuff fourteen hours into it.
Worst weather day of the trip. One of the best days of the trip. These things travel together more often than you'd think. Big breakfast before the bus at Saints of Ingram (83.04€) — we waited a long time for the food, which is the main reason the place stuck in our heads. Memory is mostly a matter of inconvenience. Then the Citylink bus Glasgow → Inveraray, two hours each way. Long, misty, properly atmospheric — and next to me, for the entire ride, a man quietly playing Pokémon Ruby on a Game Boy Advance while Scotland slid past a window he was no longer looking through. A perfect omen.
Inveraray (+) — whitewashed walls, black trim, a castle that looks fake, Loch Fyne lapping at the edge. Off-season, so the town was quiet in the particular way small towns go quiet when the season turns: not empty, just paused. The weather couldn't decide what it wanted to be and settled on all of it at once — rain, then sun, then mist, then rain again, inside an hour. The kind of place built for a postcard somebody's grandmother once sent, and somebody else threw away. Cold, exactly as advertised. First things first: straight to the Inveraray Seafood Shack, owned by our friends Ivan and Claudio. Excellent seafood, straight from the loch visible out the door. Felt like being quietly let in on a secret. Fed, we walked up to Inveraray Castle — didn't go in, the fairytale exterior was enough — and looped a slow circle around the grounds and the lochside. The mist never lifted. The mist rarely does, which is part of the deal. The George Hotel (+) — this is why you come to Inveraray. 250 years old, peat fires still going, every wall a small museum of things most people have long since forgotten. We tried almost everything on the menu, but the standout was the venison burger — venison that Ivan himself had hunted. The bill was enormous (231€ on my card, Emma covered the other 36€, and Matjaž paid another ~231€ since we split in two). Worth every pound. Bus back to Glasgow through the rain. Bemby paid for a few souvenirs for me along the way (24€). Another magnet onto the pile (9€). Magnet count: 3. A slowly accumulating refrigerator. Back at Hotel Glasgow, soaked and full.
Flight Glasgow → Milan. Collected the Golf from Malpensa long-term parking, which had been sitting exactly where we left it with the unruffled dignity of an object that cannot miss you. Autostrada back to Trieste: 31.60€ in tolls, 30€ of fuel on the way, another 69€ two days later when the tank finally asked for mercy. Straightforward.
Six days. Four people, two couples. Three magnets. One Dark Angels book. One bus ride quietly scored by Pokémon Ruby. One venison burger we'll remember longer than some of our jobs. And enough whisky to make “zljmpen” a verb we'll still be using in five years.
Total distance: ~900 km by car (Trieste ↔ Milan) + flights + train + bus. Total cost (so far): ~3,043€ | Per person (4): ~760€ (still items to be added). Countries: Italy → Scotland → Italy. Financial breakdown: ~1,133€ food and drinks (37%), ~693€ flights (23%), ~651€ accommodation (21%), ~479€ ground transport (16%), ~87€ culture and souvenirs (3%).
Top 3 spots (all first, each for a different reason): Cafe Gandolfi, Inveraray Seafood Shack, The Pot Still. Best single dish: the pies at The Pot Still in Glasgow — scotch pie, haggis pie, pot pie, all of them. Best bar for trad music: Scotia Bar (Glasgow). Best building: Caledonia Road Church — Alexander Thomson, ruined and still standing. Best museum: Kelvingrove (free, vast, exceptional). Worst weather: 4 April (Inveraray day — also the best day). Missed: Ron Mueck “A Girl” (renovating), Michael McMillen “Inner City” (renovating), Hunterian Museum (closed). Transport tip: Glasgow airport → Edinburgh works great as bus + train. Citylink bus to Inveraray is ~2h and scenic even in rain. Vocabulary acquired: “zljmpen” (drinking).
Trieste, FVG · trip diary, written April 2026.