Another way to think about it is to stop somewhere outside of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is an easy half-day trip away. Walk 200 yards of the Royal Mile from the castle. It just repeats with the same kind of tourist shops for the rest of it. Now get back in your car and go and see some of Scotland!
But don't do the thing that American tourists do where they say "Oh we're staying in Edinburgh and on Wednesday we're going to drive up to Skye to see Dun-vay-gin Castle because it's our ancestral seat because we're totally MacLeods you know"
You won't be able to drive from Edinburgh to even Kyle and back in a day, never mind up to Dunvegan. You just won't.
I could drive you from Edinburgh to Dunvegan and back in a day but I can absolutely guarantee you're going to hate every single terrifying mile of the journey and you won't get to see much.
Which reminds me of a weekend I took a few years ago where we drove to Edinburgh from Manchester on day 1 then up to Arisaig on day 2 to camp on the beach - then back to Edinburgh for a wedding on day 3 and then back to Arisaig the next day to continue the long weekend. Then full day drive back to Manchester.
I did see a Reddit thing where some tourists were planning to stay in the Lake District and visit Edinburgh and Stonehenge, all during winter.
Could've been ragebait, to be fair - they weren't interested when people pointed out that things like weather, hours of daylight, travel time were all going to be against them (or even that the Lake District is a pretty tourist-friendly place to start with).
Apple says Edinburgh to Skye is a 3.5 hour drive, mostly along the A9. My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates. What makes the trip terrifying and slower than what Apple says?
> My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates.
Not in Scotland, some of them aren't dualled (just a single carriageway in each direction), narrow, windey, full of terrible potholes and animals you can hit etc... its a 5-6 hour drive in reality
The A9 is actually pretty scary in parts because it alternates between dual carriageway and single carriageway and people have been known to get that wrong and thing they are on a dual carriageway when it is a single carriageway...
I've done that and I've driven on the A9 hundreds if not thousands of times.
What's worse is that the inbuilt mapping in a lot of new cars think bits of it are 70mph dual carriageway when it's still single carriageway, and vice-versa.
Same - driven up and down there countless times, but I still sometimes get alarmed on some of the dual carriageway parts where you can't see the other carriageway and I have a momentary panic of "This is a dual carriageway, isn't it?".
Both Apple and Google Maps greatly underestimate travel times on anything other than perfectly straight motorways. If you've never driven here before you can at least double their estimate, easily - and that assumes you are at least reasonably proficient at driving on the left at all.
The A9 is the most dangerous road in Europe, and you'll be doing 50mph at most along that because there's nowhere to overtake and that's the maximum speed trucks can go at, so you'll end up in a queue behind a truck.
Depending on the route you take, you might go through Inverness, in which case once you get off the A9 most of the road you'll be on looks like this, for about 120 miles: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9L5cSejT1eyAVR2E7
Once you get to Dalwhinnie you can turn off the A9 and start heading across to the A82, which is really pretty especially in the snow but will be mostly road like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qv1L21jk59EEAHZs9
Notice how it's not actually wide enough for two cars? But that's still a 60mph road, although you'd be lucky to be getting up to more than about 50mph.
And you'll be driving on the wrong side of the road, in an unfamiliar car, with a manual gearbox.
Google Maps says between 5 and 6 hours and 227 miles - doing that in 3.5 hours would be averaging 65mph. Good luck with that, especially when the speed limit on the A9 itself is 60 mph for cars!
The US interstate is probably more comparable with UK motorways.
I can safely do it in good conditions in six hours and I'd consider myself a very experienced driver for that route, having driven from Skye to Glasgow or Edinburgh and back a couple of times a week for years.
Another way to think about it is to stop somewhere outside of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is an easy half-day trip away. Walk 200 yards of the Royal Mile from the castle. It just repeats with the same kind of tourist shops for the rest of it. Now get back in your car and go and see some of Scotland!