In my books, that was plenty of incentive to march down to the nearest travel agency and purchase a ticket to visit the home of Loch Ness, Mary Queen of Scots and the best whisky in the world. If the Proclaimers could walk 500 miles and 500 more to be next to a woman, then surely I could pull off flying a few thousand!

Before embarking across the Atlantic, I decided that I should do some research to prepare myself for the trip. Like all good Canadians, that meant watching So I Married an Axe Murderer and Braveheart until I had all the dialogue and fake accents memorized.

I walked onto a plane bound for Scotland on September 3^rd. I had three weeks and a plan. I was going to visit this girl, Loch Ness, and as many castles as possible.

The trip got off to an ominous start. Exactly seven feet out of the Glasgow International Airport I had an abrupt brush with death. Apparently they drive on the other side of the road in Scotland, but no one thought to tell me to look the other way when crossing the street. Luckily, as I found out in due time, it only takes about three weeks to get used to this, and most tourists from North America do survive the transition.

For the first few days, I stayed with my aunt in a small town called Bathgate, halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland’s two largest cities. I had decided I would visit the girl right away and then move on to more exotic locations, like Laid, a so-called town of four people in the north of Scotland. Yes, that’s right, four.

My plans got waylaid almost immediately. I made the mistake of visiting Edinburgh on the second day of my trip and got sucked into one of the most vibrant cities I’ve ever seen. While most people think Edinburgh Castle and 14,000 other historic buildings are the city’s prime attractions, my personal favourites were the incredible art galleries. I distinctly recall thinking how boring art was when I was a teenager, but now that I’m the ripe old age of 31, seeing the work of renowned artists such as Monet, da Vinci and Dali in person seemed like a big thrill.

Edinburgh is Scotland’s "international" city, and it didn’t disappoint. I stayed in a hostel 100 yards from the Royal Mile (a brick road that leads from the royal palace to the castle), and spent most of my first week meeting people from around the world. On my first Friday night there, a group of us discovered that during the week before university starts, bars in Edinburgh give away alcohol to attract the new students. For six foreigners on travel budgets, it was the motherload of motherloads! We bar-hopped through eight different pubs and finished off one of life’s finer evenings in a five floor dance club that played songs I had never heard of before. Did I mention the booze was free?

In between my ramblings in Edinburgh, I spent a day in Glasgow and went out for lunch with the woman I had come to visit. I would love to tell you how we fell madly for each other and lived happily ever after, but she had to get back to work by two and I had a few museums to visit.

Glasgow is a much more industrialized city than Edinburgh and far less attractive. But it’s home to the Burrell Collection, a number of unrelated artifacts collected by an eccentric guy, Burrell, in the mid-1800s. To my surprise, I actually went to this museum and found myself gazing in admiration at 5000-year-old bowls, Egyptian sculptures, and swords that were used to behead kings.

After being way too artsy for my own good in the big cities, I started my second week in Scotland on a train heading north to the town of Aviemore, the country’s very own version of a cheesy resort town. Replete with a ski hill that boasts more than 400 metres of vertical and snow from December to February, Aviemore would be my base for an exploration of Scotland’s famous Castle Trail.

Of course, to explore Castle Trail, where the castles are up to 50 kilometres apart, I had to rent a car. Fortunately, other than the first half-hour when I nearly imprinted my hands into the steering wheel and had my first ‘curb incident’, the driving was actually pretty enjoyable and easy.

My Castle Trail excursion began with Balvenie Castle, an ancient fortress dating to the 13^th century that now lies in ruins near the northeast coast of Scotland. I arrived at 10 in the morning on a miserable rainy day and was surprised to see that I was the only person there. Note to self for future reference: do not visit old ruined castles alone on miserable rainy days. I was in there for less than five minutes exploring the tunnels and rooms when I got the distinct feeling that I was no longer alone. Rather than try to figure out who or what was with me, I decided I was hungry and should continue up the coast.

The highlight of the next week was my visit to the Royal Burgh (pronounced ‘burra’) of Banff in the county of Banffshire, the town and county that our Banff was named after. It was amazingly similar to our town – it too had a cannon, a castle, an ancient cathedral and a royal historic house, though theirs is called the Duff House, not the Park Admin. Building.

Located on the coast next to the Moray Firth and the North Sea, Banff is an historic international trading port best known for its fishing and as the home of Robin Hood of the Highlands. The tale of James Macpherson, or James of the Hills, and the broken fiddle is a well-known one throughout Banffshire – the leader of a band of outlaws, James played a "rant" on his fiddle the day he was to die in the town square. He broke all the strings in his fury and an hour later became the last man to be hanged in Banff, on Friday, November 16^th, 1700!

From the northeast coast, I retraced my steps south into the land of William Wallace to revisit the story of one of Scotland’s greatest heroes and the centrepiece for the movie Braveheart. I spent a day in Stirling and visited the William Wallace Monument and the awe-inspiring Stirling Castle, perched high above the city on a pinnacle of rock.

By the time I reached Stirling, I knew where my next destination lay. For two and a half weeks I had been avoiding the one place I had most looked forward to visiting. So on September 20^th, at 11 pm, I got up from my hostel bed and drove off into the night, intent on finally seeing for myself what the legend of Nessie was all about.

I spent that night in my rental car on the side of the road at the start of the legendary Loch Ness, a 40-kilometre long lake with a murky bottom and a famous ghostlike inhabitant. At daybreak I was driving along slowly, staring incessantly at the choppy waters, believing that I would actually see something. It was as ridiculous as it sounds, but I dare you to drive the length of this lake without doing the same thing!

From Loch Ness, I embarked on a 2000-kilometre loop along the extreme northwest coast of Scotland, visiting the famous West Highlands, described in my Lonely Planet guidebook as "one of the last great wildernesses in Europe." I was pretty skeptical of this declaration, but by the time I was done I had seen sights that were more staggeringly beautiful than I ever imagined could exist in Great Britain.

The highlight of my entire trip came on one of my last days there. My mother grew up in Scotland, and I grew up listening to her stories of a place she visited every weekend when she was in her 20s. She described it to me countless times as a magical stretch of hills in the West Highlands, where she said a person could walk for miles and miles and miles through the purple heather and across the barren moors. As a kid, I pretended not to listen and had assured myself that this magical place was probably anything but.

I had completely forgotten about my mother’s tales of Glen Coe until I drove into the valley on my way back to the airport in Glasgow. Known as one of the premier walking destinations in the world, Glen Coe draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year now, a far cry from the days when my mother wandered the empty hills alone or with her university friends.

Still, it was clear the magic continued to linger in the air in these hills. The sunlight bounced through the clouds to the heather-covered hills below, turning the landscape into a glittering maze of purple and gold. It was bleak and desolate, even unforgiving, yet beautiful.

If life really does run full circle, then my visit to Glen Coe and Scotland was the final piece linking my mother’s life to mine. I went to Scotland in search of a crazy notion of love, chasing a girl thousands of miles across a continent and an ocean. I left Scotland at the end of September feeling like I found something even more valuable, something I didn’t even know I was searching for – a thread running from a thistle to a maple leaf, from a mother to a son.