At 12.23pm on Friday 20 July 2007 I received Andy Nicholson’s very first email. I remember that day so clearly, and everything that happened afterwards.
I just knew deep inside that my life was about to change. This day 19 years ago was the start of our journey together.
My online dating profile had just gone live 10 minutes earlier when this handsome man’s face appeared on my screen. Andy had signed in to the dating website for the first time in 8 months because he had received a ‘hello’ message from a lady in the USA. So he signed in to read her email, but he saw me online and connected with me instead. It all happened within a five minute window of time.
He sent me a lovely email which I received at 12.23pm, I replied at 12.53pm. This was on a Friday – 20 July 2007 – and I remember it all so clearly.
The following Sunday he just happened to be coming back to the UK for 12 days from Austria, where he’d been working for the previous 18 months. So he asked whether I’d be willing to come to London and join him at the event he would be working at. I booked a flight from Inverness to London and we met just one calendar week after we’d first connected online when 1500 miles apart.
I can still remember how I felt as I walked towards the airport gate, knowing he was just beyond those big grey doors. My heart was pounding! I needn’t have worried. Standing there was a tall man wearing shorts, t-shirt and Roman sandals. I must admit I did doubletake his knees and calves! Several times! He took my case with one hand, then took my hand with the other, and we began walking to his car. Somehow I felt like I knew him.
We spent four magical days together. We had separate hotel rooms and he was a perfect Gentleman – he took such good care of me. The second time we met 6 weeks later, he flew back from Austria once again and we spent another long weekend together. He took me to meet his parents and his friends, and then drove me from Warwickshire to South Wales so he could meet my parents.
After that, we made plans to move in together and did so within a few months – he moved from Austria back into his apartment in Warwickshire, and I moved south from Inverness to move in with him in January 2008.
At that time, I had been running confidence-building workshops and support groups around the Highlands for almost a year, speaking at lots of events and coaching one-to-one with people struggling with fear, alongside working for Highland Council for 16 years. So I was walking away from my well-established self-employed business in the Highlands, and also from my home in Culloden, to follow a new path to be with someone I had met twice. Every ounce of my being told me I was meant to be on this new path.
I missed the Highlands every day. But I knew that being with Andy was where I was meant to be. Sometimes you have to let go of something you love and so I knew I had to let go of everything. I trusted completely. It hurt my heart to leave the Highlands, but I learned so much about myself by doing so…
(I would not swap a single day of that journey, because when we did come home to the Highlands, I lived in a state of permanent gratitude and appreciation, and this has never subsided. If anything it has grown…)
After I moved south, Andy became a teacher along with me, and we ran our first two day confidence-building workshop as a team at a retreat centre in Warwickshire within one week of moving in together. It was lovely to share that experience with him. We were on a clear path from day one…walking step by step as a team.
Over the course of the many years that we ran workshops, we delivered over 250 of them to around 3000 people. We spoke at more than 150 events, from Business Networking Breakfasts to the annual Mind Body Spirit Festival in London. We did dozens of radio interviews and appeared in many magazine articles. We even made the centre pages of the national press once, and were featured on the cover of two magazines. We began developing several confidence-building courses and Breakthrough Experiences as our own learning grew. We worked with couples on the brink of divorce, with families who were unable to get along, and with individuals who wanted to step through their fears and begin living the dreams they had kept so well hidden. Letters we received from clients told us that we changed many lives for the better, saved quite a few marriages, and apparently we’re responsible for 8 babies being born into this world as a direct result of the work we did with couples.
It was hard work, but very exciting. Talk about stepping out of your comfort zone! Everything felt achievable because we were doing it as a team…
Then in 2013 my ex contacted me to say he wanted to move on, and he asked me what I wanted to do with my half of the house in Culloden. The house had been mortgage-free for many years, but I never asked him to move out when our marriage ended, because I couldn’t bring myself to sell it. This call came on the same day that Skyfall was released in the cinemas, and so after already having plans to go see it that afternoon, Andy left the cinema having made the decision to buy the other half of my Culloden home – a house he had never seen, in a small city he’d only passed through once before. I reckon it was those Highland scenes in Skyfall that did it!
And so, in February 2013, Andy brought me home to the Scottish Highlands, to the home he knew I loved and had missed dreadfully. Papers were signed, keys exchanged, and we stepped through the door… He was a brave soul – he didn’t know whether he’d love it or hate it here, but he sold his own place and bought the other half of mine anyway. That takes some bravery, but then I had made a similar move 5 years earlier to be with him. We both trusted completely that life would unfold as it was meant to.
As it turns out, Andy fell deeply in love with Scotland and Scottish History, and if we were ever to go our separate ways, he would remain here. That makes me very happy.
So it turns out that we brought each other home…
When we moved home to Culloden, we began running Breakthrough Experiences from home. Clients would fly to Inverness and stay with us for several days while we worked with them intensively.
Back in 2013 we also began a Personal Development Group in Inverness, bringing in speakers and well-known authors from around the world. We’d often have around 100 people at some events, and all proceeds were donated to Highland charities. However, the work involved became too much for the two of us to continue with sadly. Volunteers to help with the workload were few, so we stopped running the charity group as we needed to focus our efforts on earning a living too. But it really was an amazing experience.
In August 2013 we were married at the Archive Centre in Inverness, and then in September 2013 we were Handfast in our Culloden home. Friends flew to Inverness to celebrate with us, and we had our wedding lunch at the Inn on Dores Beach, on the banks of Loch Ness.
So how did we end up as Tour Guides?
We realised back in 2016 that instead of teaching personal development and helping others create the life of their dreams, we wanted to begin quietly living everything we’d learned and create the life of our own dreams. Through 2016 we were destined to become Tour Guides. The history bug had bitten us both and we were completely hooked. Everything was conspiring in our favour for this to happen – some pretty spookily wonderful things unfolded, which, when we look back, seem almost surreal – the timing of each step was incredible.
And then something magical happened that same year. One conversation with a Stonemason triggered memories that would arouse a passion so deep, that it would become like fuel. He showed me some photos of a sword and targe that had been taken into the Battle of Culloden. As he was speaking to me, every synapse in my brain was firing, and from that night, I began to have dreams about my past life as a male Jacobite. Every night for two and a half years, I would lay my head on the pillow and disappear back into the 18th century for 7 hours. My dreams were not of battles. They were of ordinary everyday life in the 18th century. Paths I walked, places I visited, homes I visited and lived in, people I knew, even meetings I attended. Dreams of old Edinburgh, old Inverness, old Lochaber… every dream was crystal clear, and I remember them as clearly now as I did when I woke each morning. Sometimes I’d have the exact same dream several nights running.
When I first moved here in 1990, my soul knew that I had come ‘home‘. I also knew that I had been here in a past life, but the memories eluded me. I would walk through Culloden Woods and find myself crying, without understanding why. Then, that one conversation triggered those memories and everything began to make sense.
Sometimes, something as simple as a conversation can unlock the subconscious in the same way that a past life regression can. The story the Stonemason told me was one I already knew, one I remembered. This is the thing about past life memories – your subconscious won’t reveal them to you until you’re ready to deal with what they uncover. And I was ready. Finally. To receive the knowledge that my soul already knew. I was in the right place, with the right person, and we were turning our life-purpose in the right direction. So all my actions were telling my subconscious mind “Je Suis Prest!”
In creating our Tour Guiding business we actively brought together all the elements of everything we love – Scotland, Scottish history, teaching, travel, mountains, glens, the Highlands, photography, past life regression, being with people, reading, research – and we created a beautiful little business that buzzed around a central core of our combined passions in life.
But at this point in time, we had never heard of Outlander.
So how did we end up developing Outlander Tours…?
At the same time that I began having the dreams, I began to share my past life memories as a Jacobite on my personal Facebook Page. The dreams were so vivid, that I would share descriptions of them with my friends. After reading several of them, a friend of mine from Edinburgh sent me a message “Di, you really need to watch Outlander”. This was back in 2016 and I had never heard of it. She reminded me three times, until Andy and I opened a bottle of wine one night and sat down to watch Outlander.
We both sat there in silence with our mouths hanging open. We both felt like we’d been hit with a bolt of lightning. I don’t know how to find the words to explain it, in all honesty. But from the first few episodes, we both saw so many of the very same things we’d just been through ourselves, except time-travel was replaced with past life memories.
We both knew immediately that it felt right to create an Outlander Tour, and to include it with the Clan based and other private tours we were already running. There were only a handful of Outlander Tours around back then. We wanted to bring all of our passions into it, and bring the Outlander experience to life. I also wanted to connect with people who’d experienced strong feelings towards Scotland after watching or reading Outlander, but without understanding why (in just the same way I had after visiting for the first time).
And so the work began to bring it all together. We both remember our very first visits to the filming locations, after having tracked them all down, which took quite some research back then. Then we came home and watched the series again, having just stood in those places – that felt so surreal. There was a lot of work involved in putting the tour together, and for those of you who have been on our Seven Day Outlander Tour, you will know how well-planned this multi-day experience is, how much of both the Outlander content and the real history we share, and how beautifully it unfolds between the Lowlands and the Highlands as the story weaves together like a rich plaid. It’s been a labour of love to create, and love it we do!
At the time we were setting up the business, many friends told me I was crazy to talk about my past life memories so publicly. But, I’ve always followed my own path and created a life that was right for me, as opposed to creating a life that was right for someone else (why would anyone do that, after all?) And so, hand in hand with Andy, we built our own path and we began to walk it. From the very first day, the right people found us, and the business grew wings.
During the two years that the world shut down, we created four Virtual Tours about 18th century Scotland, thanks to Andy’s thousands of photos, my many videos, and the 18th century maps that we’d invested in. Each Virtual Tour lasted around 2.5 to 3.5 hours and they were delivered over Zoom by both of us. Andy meanwhile, created a 10 Episode Whisky Academy (11 hours in length) and learned just about everything there is to know about whisky. We had over 3000 people attend our Virtual Tours, often with 100 people on a zoom meeting each time. Those two years were spent learning, researching, creating and connecting with people online. The Virtual Tours saw our business through that time, creating a demand for our Seven Day Outlander Tours which we took several years to catch up with.
Andy and I have done so much for each other. We have encouraged the other to step up and fulfil life ambitions that would have been so much more difficult to have achieved individually. We each provided a staircase for the other so that we could walk up our staircases together, if that makes sense. I can name many things I would not have been able to achieve without Andy, and he can name just as many, though entirely different things, that he would not have been able to achieve without me. When we work together as a team, we seem able to achieve everything we both set out to. We are equal partners, but bring entirely different elements into our relationship. We are never in competition with one another, because the elements we both bring create the ‘whole’… we consider life to be like a dance, where we’ve learned how to ebb and flow together as a team.
Over the last 19 years Andy and I have spent the majority of our time living and working together. When people ask us how long we’ve been together, we tell them 19 years, but in terms of the time that most married couples who don’t work together spend together through a year, it’s more like 70 years! They always laugh, but it’s most likely true…
We know we’re soulmates, though now we now jokingly refer to ourselves as ‘cellmates‘…
It’s safe to say we know one another extremely well. He still gives me butterflies, especially in his various kilts. Sometimes I watch him quietly while he’s resting because he is so beautiful to me. He has the peacefulness and strength of a Warrior…
Our meeting on this day back in 2007 happened at exactly the right time in our lives. I guess when it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. Life finds a way… the synchronicity of our meeting was not something we could ever have planned ourselves. That tiny five minute gap in which we connected changed both of our futures radically. I wonder where we’d both be now had he not signed in at that precise moment, had that woman from the USA not written to him…
In terms of personal learning, he and I have travelled an incredible journey together. In all honesty, what we have learned about life, love and purpose, simply by being together has been one of the most precious journeys of our lives. I don’t even know how to explain it fully in words, as so much of it has been experiential learning and then applying that learning to everyday life.
Little did we know back in 2007 what an incredible journey we had ahead… magical times, great times, good times, intimate times, fun times, sad times, difficult times, challenging times, and times that real dreams are made of… and every one of them has made up the tapestry of our journey together so far. Step by step we walked our paths…
And so here we with lives completely immersed in the Scottish Highlands. I often wonder whether back in the days when we first met, if I had told him that some years later he would be gallivanting around the Highlands dressed as a Jacobite with a largecollection of weapons, a library of 18th century books, in a home with wrought iron chandeliers, stags heads, antique spinning wheels and 300 year old documents, whether he would have stayed or run a mile…
Man, I’m glad he stayed!
And a VERY big thank you to Diana Gabaldon for the incredible richness and joy that Outlander has brought into both of our lives, and subsequently, the richness and joy it allows us to share with others…
Forever gratefully yours, Di & Andy
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