When I wasn’t golfing, I took the time to wander around the town; to the east is the Castle, the Cathedral, the Harbour, The East Sands, The St Andrews Museum; to the west are the West Sands, a university park and the golf courses; to the south is the botanical gardens; to the north is the British Golf Museum and the Sea Aquarium.

The Castle and the Cathedral are in ruins, victims of the Protestant Reformation. According to one of the guides, the Scots are nothing if not frugal, and the stones of the Castle and Cathedral were reused to build the town. The St Andrews Museum captures a brief slice of life from the last century.

The Botanical Gardens have quite a wide variety of plants to view. The greenhouses have desert plants, tropical plants, and everything in between. I spent a number of hours just wandering through the park.

The British Golf Museum give the history of golf from the British perspective, and it may be fair to say, the St Andrews perspective. While it was interesting to see the development of the equipment over time, reading about who was the club captain and what they did for a particular club wasn’t of much interest.

The Sea Aquarium contains a variety of fish and explains how the local habitats are changing and how the local fish population is changing. They have a large shark tank, tanks with cod, halibut, flounder, rock dwellers and many other temperate species. They also had a large tropical, reef fish section. The stars of the place are two common seals that live at the aquarium. Evidently, one of them escaped got out several years ago during a big storm and three days later they saw a familiar face at the fence at feeding time saying “Let me back in!” They’ve been in human care since they were pups and can’t compete in the wild.

The West Beach is a long strand of sand that gets very wide at low tide. The Scots flock there during the summer. The East beach seems to be where the surfers and kayakers hang out.