Somewhere over Greenland, my daughter was rereading a book she has read what she describes as a bagillion times, highlighter in hand, and I thought: well, this blog post basically wrote itself.
My daughter's love affair with the wizarding world did not start last week or last year. It started when she was five years old and I put her first-ever audiobook into her ears and just... let her go. That was it. Hooked for life. Books, then more books, then bookstores, then libraries as a genre of vacation activity, and eventually — because fourteen-year-olds contain multitudes — a full personality built around being a tried and true Slytherin. Ambition, cunning, a closet that's gone increasingly collegiate.
So when we landed in the UK with seven days and three cities on the calendar, there was only one way this trip was getting planned: by the actual super fan. Not a package tour. Not some pre-set itinerary with a bus schedule and a badge lanyard. A make-it-yourself pilgrimage, built by a teenager with very strong opinions about which site mattered more. Quick and dirty, on a budget, whirlwind to say the least. If you're planning something similar, my budget travel breakdown has the actual numbers and what we pack for a trip like this walks through the logistics side.
Edinburgh: Diagon Alley Has a Postcode
We based ourselves in Portobello for the stretch in Edinburgh, and it turned out to be one of the better calls of the whole trip. It's the quiet alternative to downtown during Fringe Festival season — a boardwalk with some solid fish and chips spots, locals just hanging out on benches, seagulls doing seagull things, excellent people-watching. Nearly everywhere takes contactless payments, which is a relief because the days of fumbling for exact coins are mostly over — though fair warning, the pound hitting your bank account is genuinely a gut punch when it converts a full third higher than you budgeted for. Also: a ton of tourists in Edinburgh right now, mostly Americans, though I heard a surprising amount of Spanish being spoken too.
From home base, the pilgrimage itself went like this:
First, Victoria Street, which does not try very hard to hide the fact that it is, colloquially, Diagon Alley — the curve of the street, the stacked colorful shopfronts, the whole effect. It's touristy. It knows it's touristy. Go anyway. There you’ll find the Museum of Context — technically a shop, not a museum, though the name earns its keep. It's officially licensed Harry Potter merchandise gone properly immersive: film replicas (hello, Dobby sculpture), journals, wax seals, quill pens, artwork from independent artists, the works. But the real draw is the ground it's standing on. This stretch of Victoria Street is where J.K. Rowling actually lived and drew inspiration for the wizarding world, and — because the Dark Academia in us cannot resist a good grim historical footnote — those believed to be meddling in the dark arts were once hanged just a few paces from the front door.
Then Greyfriars Kirkyard, which might be the most quietly haunted stop on the entire pilgrimage — in the best way. Somewhere in there is a headstone for a Thomas Riddell, who died in 1806 and, per the kirk's own account, is "said to have subconsciously inspired" a certain Dark Lord's original name. Wander a little further and you'll find a Moody and a McGonagall too, which is either an extraordinary coincidence of Scottish surnames or exactly the kind of graveyard browsing a young writer does when she's building a world. The kirk is upfront that none of this is confirmed — it's rumor and "said to have," not fact — but the whole yard is also rumored to be the inspiration behind Godric's Hollow, the eerie, beautiful graveyard where Harry's parents are buried, and honestly, that one's easy to believe. It's a real, working, slightly eerie old cemetery, not a set, and it felt like the most honest stop of the whole trip: no ticket booth, no gift shop, just moss and old stone doing exactly what old stone in Scotland does.
And we saved the best for last: the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Genuinely great fun — more interestering than a room full of old paintings and busts has any right to be — and a nice note to end the Edinburgh leg on.
Tourists strolling Victoria Street in Edinburgh, the colorful, curved lane known as Diagon Alley.
London: The Splurge, and Why It Was Worth It
The Warner Bros. Studio Tour was never in question. Duh. This was the one line item where we splurged on transport, and I'd do it again.
Golden Tours runs a bus from Baker Street out to the studio, and the ticket that reads like a one-way is actually round trip — you just also have the option to pay an extra £15 for a flexible return time, which is worth it if anyone in your group is the "I need to see everything" type. We are that type. We used every extra minute and still had about fifteen to spare before our scheduled departure. The tour operators are not explicitly clear about what's happening or when, so my honest advice is: just go with the flow. The bus out took about ninety minutes; the bus back, forty-five.
The studio tour itself is four hours. Wear real shoes — it's enormous, and you will be on your feet the entire time. The original sets are genuinely cool to see up close. Halfway through you land at the Backlot Cafe, right past the Hogwarts Express and the first of two enormous gift shops, where you can get a Butterbeer (cream soda, whipped cream on top, a full sugar bomb, no notes) alongside burgers, salads, and hot dogs that are shockingly not bad — which feels necessary after you've been shuffling through Harry Potter World for two straight hours.
If you're not a theme park person, know what you're walking into: this is that. Cheesy in places, crowded, plenty of standing in line, very Disney-adjacent in spirit. Worth it for the actual Potter nerds. Gaia got emotional and did not want to leave, which, fair. I adore John Williams, but that score is so pervasive throughout the tour that it will be stuck in your head for days afterward in a way that starts to feel a little Clockwork Orange. The things we do for our kids.
Oxford: Where the Pilgrims Go to Sit in Cloisters
Oxford is where the trip fully tipped over into Dark Academia territory — and also where we discovered that many pounds are required for entrance fees at every single pilgrimage site a Potter-and-adjacent-literature fan could want. We had to pick our battle.
Here's the honest budget confession: by the time we hit Oxford, we'd blown through what we'd allotted for the trip, so Gaia chose New College — for the cloisters, and specifically for a genuine pilgrimage to the tree where Draco Malfoy once sat his cute little bottom — was the one paid entrance we prioritized, and the only one we went inside. Humans are wonderful and weird, and we watched people arrive from literally all over the world to stand in front of a tree with the same reverence you'd bring to a cathedral. We sat in those cloisters like we, too, were students somewhere magical, and just watched the pilgrimage happen around us.
Everything else — The stairs at Christ Church where Tom Riddle makes his first Chamber of Secrets appearance, the Bodleian library, the His Dark Materials and Alice in Wonderland sites scattered around town — we admired from the outside and called it even. Budget is budget and our legs were having trouble staying up underneath us.
Here's the insider tip nobody tells you, though: you can get a small glimpse for free at what fans call the Tom Riddle stairs inside Christ Church. If you show up for Evensong, 6pm on Sundays, and you're in for free. Heads up on what you're walking into, though — it is not a lively, sing-along, Southern Baptist-style service. It's the hallelujah, choral, deeply Anglican kind. People are very, very still and very, very quiet. Sit in the back if you’re not a church-person.
The Unfiltered Truth, Somewhere Around Day Five
I'm going to be honest with you here, touristing is exhausting. Slow travel is 100% the way to go, and I will die on this hill. Touristing at this pace means there's no time or energy left over for actual studies — which matters when your kid's education is happening in real time, on the road, not on some summer-vacation clock. It means the routine goes straight out the window. Where are you supposed to find a gym in a new city every two days? You don't build anything. You just locate a random set of machines, use them once, and move on before your body even registers what happened.
After five days of nonstop touristing in, I am done. Cooked. The Harry Potter World day alone did me in. Right now, mid-trip, all I want is to sit my ass in this hotel room and do absolutely nothing productive for twelve straight hours. And of course it's raining. Of course. The UK is expensive in a way that sneaks up on you even when you think you've budgeted for it, and I'm now fairly convinced I packed all the wrong clothes for this particular flavor of gray. Lessons for another post, on both counts — more on what actually goes in the bag and why we're rethinking the pace of days like this one soon.
The Quick and Dirty Version, If You're Planning Your Own
Seven days, three cities, zero package tours. Built by a fourteen-year-old with a list and a limited budget, adjusted in real time by an adult who has one or two foreign trips under her belt. It is entirely possible to do a Potter pilgrimage without an organized tour group herding you — you just need one obsessive with strong opinions on the itinerary, which, lucky for us, we had built in.
This is basically the same instinct behind why we do mid-term stays instead of boxed-up vacation packages in the first place: you get more say over your own pace, and it costs less to actually live somewhere for a bit instead of paying resort markup for the privilege of being told where to stand.
That's the whole philosophy behind Shabby Sheek Rentals back home in Bozeman too — no cookie-cutter package, just a real place to actually settle into. Here's the whole origin story if you're curious how this started.
For the Worldschoolers in the Group
If you're wondering how a fourteen-year-old had the bandwidth to research and build this entire pilgrimage herself, that's worldschooling for you — using the actual world, actual museums, actual literature-soaked cobblestones, as the curriculum. We go deep on what that looks like day to day, the good and the genuinely hard parts, in my full guide to worldschooling on the road. Short version: it's not school-at-home-but-abroad, it's letting the place itself do a lot of the teaching.
And if this whole "quick and dirty, three cities, seven days" pace sounds intense — it was. For more on how we decide when to move fast versus when to plant ourselves somewhere for a month, see on the road vs. at base camp and what nomad life actually looks like day to day.
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