(SOUNDBITE OF BAND OF THE ROYAL TANK REGIMENT'S "SCOTLAND THE BRAVE")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
B.J. Leiderman writes our theme music. Ah, he's not Scottish. But Andrew Weir, he's Scottish - very, very Scottish.
ANDREW WEIR: (Reading) Is there for honest poverty, that hangs his head, and all that. The coward slave, we pass him by, we dare be poor for all that.
SIMON: He's also a man of many tam o' shanters. He was a child actor who played the role of young Hamish in "Braveheart."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BRAVEHEART")
WEIR: (As Hamish) With your father and brother gone, they'll kill us and burn the farm.
SIMON: As an adult, he worked the whiskey trade for more than a decade. Now he sells cognac. To round off his Scottish Mc-bona fides (ph), Andy Weir is also one of the world's foremost reciters of the Scottish poet Robert Burns.
WEIR: (Reading) For all that and all that. It's coming yet, for all that, that man to man the world over shall brothers be for all that.
SIMON: Boy, I wish I knew what he was saying. Burns and Weir both hail from Ayrshire, the coastal county near Glasgow. That also happens to be home to Trump Turnberry golf course, one of the two resorts the president will visit during his trip to Scotland. He's got a range of historic courses on which he could play.
WEIR: Yes, Turnberry, which I know is quite pertinent to current affairs, but also true, which held the Open Championship last year, and Prestwick, which held the first ever Open.
SIMON: But Weir says there's more to Ayrshire than golf.
WEIR: Ayrshire also has quite a reputation for birthing people who have changed the world. I mean, people like Alexander Fleming is from Ayrshire, who discovered penicillin. William Wallace spent a lot of time in Ayrshire. Robert the Bruce was an Ayrshire man.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUSPICIOUS MINDS")
ELVIS PRESLEY: (Singing) We're caught in a trap. I can't walk out.
SIMON: So many famous people have stayed in the area, even if it was just a brief layover at Prestwick Airport.
WEIR: Interestingly enough, it's the only place in the U.K. that Elvis Presley ever touched down.
SIMON: He wasn't the king of rock 'n' roll, but President Eisenhower did have his own castle fit for a king in Ayrshire.
WEIR: In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the National Trust for Scotland actually gifted a suite in Culzean Castle to President Eisenhower as a gift for his consequential and incredible service to the world during the Second World War. I think he visited multiple times, and I think even once as president. So he used to call it - or he would refer to it as his Scottish White House.
(SOUNDBITE OF BAND OF THE ROYAL TANK REGIMENT'S "SCOTLAND THE BRAVE")
SIMON: President Trump does have some deep ties to Scotland. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, was born on the Isle of Lewis. And while the president is famously a nondrinker who won't unwind with a wee dram after a day on the links, he could cool off with a can of Irn-Bru, a soda that's the unofficial national drink of Scotland. I wonder if they serve it at one of the 95 McDonald's in Scotland.
(SOUNDBITE OF BAND OF THE ROYAL TANK REGIMENT'S "SCOTLAND THE BRAVE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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