So if I had six days here’s what I would do.
Limit my London time since you’ve done it before you to just two days. Catch a musical or play or two in the West End as I do think it’s better than Broadway in general and maybe hit up a comedy club, hit some pubs, stop off at any of the good museums you may have mentioned (I’m sure you’ve done the Brit, but if you haven’t done the Tower plus the Crown Jewels tour and a tour of Westminister Abbey you should definitely do those). You’ve been there enough so I’ll just limit my statements on London up this.
Then I’d take the Flying Scotsman up to Edinburgh and rent a car near the station. Edinburgh itself is more of a walking city but I didn’t find it impossible to drive around and the Scottish countryside is pretty easy.
Day One and part of Two: Bypass the city stuff and head over to Bonnyrigg and do what I said before about the stuff inside and around Dalhousie Castle. I forgot to mention there’s a fair amount of gin distilleries in the area as well.
Day Two and part of Three: Make your way up to the Speyside distilleries. The northern most famous one is a 3.5 hour drive from Edinburgh but there are several famous Scotch distilleries within a 30-40 min drive of each other like Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, Macallan, Cardhu (one of the main suppliers for Johnnie Walker), Balvenie, Singleton of Glendullan, Glen Moray, Glenfarclas, Cragganmore, Glen Grant (which has a great gardens around the distillery) etc... Along the way there are some distilleries in between Edinburgh and the eastern Speyside concentration of distilleries around Dufftown like Dalwhinnie (which I really enjoyed touring although it’s considered a Highland malt, not a Speyside). If you stop off at the Famous Grouse Experience (which is located at Glenturret) either along the way or when in Bonnyrigg, you’ll get to see and try a couple of Scotches in both the Speyside category and the Highland Category (Dalwhinnie and Glenturret).
One cool thing to do in the Speyside would be canoing the Spey river while doing whiskey tasting but you’d need to add a day to this as it’s a 50 mile downriver trip.
http://www.spiritofthespey.co.uk/open-canoeing-journeys-river-spey-scotland/
There’s tons of picturesque craggy old castles to get great photos of and plenty of great golf courses if you’re into that (I’m not). I would highly recommend staying at the Mash Tun in Arbelour as it’s not just a great little B&B but one of the best pubs in the area with Scotches from all 50 Speyside distilleries as you’ll clearly never make it to all of them.
Day Four: Make it about Edinburgh. Do the Royal Mile and make sure you tour Edinburgh Castle and spend a couple of hours in the Camera Obscura and National Museum of Scotland. Grab dinner and more whiskey at the Arcade Bar (one of you should get the Diana preparation (a cream sauce instead of the more typical whiskey brown sauce) of the house made haggis, Americans love to %*%* about haggis but once you have theirs you’ll know why Scots love it. One of the best dishes I’ve had in Europe).
And absolutely finish with a ghost tour. Sounds stupid and touristy but it is utterly fantastic. They do take you on a brisk and hilly hike so be prepared for that (ie in shape enough and both wearing appropriate shoes), but the piece de resistance is that they take you to the cemetery outside of Worlds End where every murderer and other terrible person in Edinburgh was executed for hundreds if not thousands of years and then their bodies cut into pieces and scattered around the graveyard (the Scots believe that if you’re body is not intact your ghost is trapped on Earth trying to reassemble it and they do that so if a person is wrongly executed they can’t go to heaven and accuse the executioner and judge before God so it’s a way to CYA. And as a result there are thousands of ghosts around a small spot. Now I do NOT believe in ghosts (or so I tell myself now) but if I did my visit would be why. They take you to the execution site (most of the heads are buried within eyesight of the execution to taunt the spirits no joke) where you’ve walked all over the heads of slain murderers and then they turn out the lights and tell you to take photos. Without exaggeration I took photos of hundreds of orbs in the area. Now scientific skeptics claim that orbs are just light reflecting off of rain/sleet or bugs in the area, but there was none of that when I was there. It was freezing cold so no bugs were active and it had snowed the week before and there was now zero humidity. So no rain, no bugs but hundreds of bright green glowing orbs in all my pictures.
I don’t believe in ghosts (keep repeating this).
But anyways, the itenary I set out is diverse as opposed to the typical touron European vacation: see museums and eat food, repeat ad nauseum. Scotland DOES have great museums and castles to visit, but it’s also got a lot of great drinking/“tasting” to do when it comes to Scotches and gins, great hunting and fishing, golf, spas, hiking, canoing, horseback riding (which I forgot to mention, LOTS of great opportunities in the Highlands around Edinburgh and Speyside), etc... Add in the great plays, musicals and comedy clubs in London and the fantastic food in both London and Scotland (Scottish restaurants are MUCH better than Non-London English and Welsh imo) and you can make a really diverse vacation matching girly and manly things to do, plus the falconry is really only easy to do in Scotland especially the Edinburgh Highlands region and makes for awesome pics and stories.
