Day Eight: The Third and Final Castle

Edinburgh Castle, as I mentioned, is impossible to ignore. Unless you're my mother and there's really bad fog (hi Mom!) and then you don't even realize there IS a castle until day two. Since we were right next to it, we decided to go pay a visit right after Whisky School (I know that's not what it's properly called, but I like it.)

Luckily, when we were at Stirling Castle, I had purchased admission to Edinburgh Castle at the same time. This allowed us to bypass the queue (forgive me but I love that word) and go straight into the castle. This would not have mattered at Stirling but was absolutely key at Edinburgh. The castle was mobbed with tourists. I mean, we're tourists too, so whatever. But still. Overrun. Honestly, between the cold and the crowds, the whole experience lingers as a weird combination of feverish chills and claustrophobia, with a fair smattering of gorgeous ancient things.

E was in much better shape than I, and quite prepared to traipse about ancient castle times. Many of these pictures are also to his credit.

Too many humans. 

Day Eight: Whisky School

I find myself procrastinating a bit on writing these last posts, because I have this feeling that when I do, the whole thing will be over and done with and that's not a nice feeling. I was almost as sad when the time came to stop writing about Islay as I was when we actually left Islay. But, there's really no way out but through it. So, I'll begin discussing our last real day.

We had twenty four hours left in Edinburgh. The cold, which E had mostly conquered, had properly taken hold of my senses. It actually seems fitting in retrospect that I spent most of my last day viewing and enjoying things through a bit of a fog, because the prospect that our vacation was actually ending seemed unreal to me.

When we were first planning this trip, E knew he wanted to  book the Whisky Masterclass Experience when we were in Edinburgh. I remember that he asked me, with some concern, whether I thought I'd be up for drinking whisky at 10am. I reminded him of this before we left, and we both laughed, remembering the girl that was solidly intoxicated at Lagavulin before noon. With that, we cheerily set off for an early morning lesson on whisky, so maybe I could sort of start understanding all the stuff I'd been drinking for the past week.

Day Seven: Parking a Car in Edinburgh

After a brief pit stop for present shopping (in which I stared at 47 different plaids for longer than anyone would find necessary trying to pick the perfect scarf for my mother) we regretfully left Pitlochry to make our way to Edinburgh.

When E originally started planning this trip, I did read somewhere that the Festival, which takes place for all of August in Edinburgh, would make things a little zoo-y. However, once we were able to easily find reasonably priced hotel rooms, I figured that was the end of our worries. I was, as usual, wrong.

The drive to Edinburgh was fairly easy and straightforward. The one thing we hadn't anticipated was finding parking. In Glasgow, it had been stupid easy - there was an (expensive) parking garage right across the street from our hotel, with plentiful spaces for a tiny Peugeot. This was not the case in Edinburgh. And the situation was aggravated by both the narrow windy streets and the amount of roads closed for the Festival. We finally ended up calling my dad, in the US, to ask him to google parking garages in Edinburgh. It didn't work, but we did eventually find one, and traipse with our luggage to the hotel.

Our hotel was quite centrally located, right on Princes Street. The rest of it was adequate. Honestly, I was a little disappointed after Pitlochry, but we didn't come to Edinburgh to sit in a hotel room. After a brief respite and ingestion of cold medicine (it was my turn to be sick), we decided to shake off the vaguely PTSD like symptoms that persisted after our parking problems and go 'splorin.

Almost all the Edinburgh pictures are courtesy of E. I was in a bit of a cold fog most of the time, and not as handy with my camera is I should've been.

Walter Scott Statue across from our hotel - he's had a rough festival

Day Six/Seven: Our Brief Taste of the Highlands

One of the best and worst things about this trip is that every place we went was my favorite and I wanted to stay there forever. Nowhere did I feel this more strongly than Pitlochry. We were smart enough to allocate several days to Islay. Glasgow and Edinburgh are amazing, but I'd also seen them before. The Highlands, however, were an entirely new experience for me.

We left Stirling Castle in the late afternoon, and, after a panicked search for a gas station (seriously. There was a dearth of gas stations in the greater Stirling region) we were en route to Pitlochry. At first, the roads looked much like New England: two lane highways twisting their way through rolling hills liberally covered in pine trees. If you squinted your eyes a bit, you'd almost be home. But, at a closer glance, everything was different. The pine trees were tall and slender, not short and squat. I'm not sure what the other trees were, but I don't think they were maples. The flowers were different. As our tiny little Peugeot bravely made its way higher and higher, the scenery became more stunning and dramatic. The trees grew taller. The hills were higher, their tops more rocky and stark. I was staring out the window, drinking in the landscape like I was dying of thirst.

Unfortunately, I didn't take many pictures. I'm guessing because I'm an idiot. For most of these posts, I've been choosing between an abundance of pictures, but you're literally getting everything I have of Pitlochry. Oh well, reason to go back to the Highlands?

I did get a few snapshots of Pitlochry itself. It looked, to me (who has never been to Switzerland) like a town from the Alps that somehow lost its way and ended up in the Scottish highlands. I knew straight away that one night and one morning wouldn't be enough.

Day Six: Stirling Castle

I think I took well over 75 photos at Stirling Castle. Be warned.

First of all, E gets all the glory and credit for even thinking to stop at Stirling Castle on our way from Glasgow to Pitlochry. In fact, he deserves a great deal of glory and credit for planning this entire trip: my contributions were pretty much limited to agreeing, showing up where I was meant to, and happily participating in the activities that he had planned for our mutual amusement. He has the important skill of being able to plan a day that's well scheduled without feeling harried; my own penchant for laziness leads to a lot more sitting about in hotels followed by a lot more regret later.

Our destination upon leaving Glasgow was Pitlochry, the home of Blair Athol. It was an hour and a half drive from the city, which, to our American ears was nothing. E lives an hour away from me, and that hardly seems a big deal, so an hour and a half seemed like nothing. He had planned a pit stop at Stirling Castle along the way, so we could take in some culture along with the whisky. It was a splendiferous idea.

We pulled into the castle just as the rain was clearing up, and, for the first time, I managed to catch an actual rainbow on my camera.

Pot of gold pending. 

Day Six: Pipers and Pitlochry

It's doubtful that I'll get even close to dealing with Pitlochry in this post, but I really like alliteration and couldn't resist.

Sunday's weather forecast was pretty much the same as the weather forecast for every other day we'd spent in Scotland - it would be somewhere around 60 degrees and, at some point, it would rain. I'm certain that some of the incidents which I describe as rain would hardly register on the Scottish radar. This is how I picture a conversation going:

me: "Nice day yesterday, despite the rain."
Scottish person: "But it was quite fine yesterday."
me: "Well yes, but it rained for a while after lunch."
Scottish person: "No, it was clear."
me: "Don't you remember around 2, when it got really cloudy and water fell from the sky for twenty minutes?"
Scottish person (with look of disdain): "Well, if you're counting THAT as rain..." (implication: "... you foolish American")
me: (blushes in shame, hides)

Glasgow's weather, though, was less of that and more of clear followed by TORRENTIAL RAGING DOWNPOUR followed by clear and then... well, you get the picture.

Day Five: The Dude Abides

After Auchentoshan, we settled in at our Glasgow hotel, which was in a cool old fashioned building where you had to open a gate to use the elevator. This charmed me entirely, and I was glad that E didn't hesitate at using the elevator, even though we were only going up one floor. Had he resisted, I would have been forced to insist, because that's how fascinated I was by this gate closing elevator procedure.

For dinner in Glasgow, we planned to travel to the Brewdog (http://www.brewdog.com/bars/glasgow). E had done research on this place before we came and I was certainly eager enough to go a craft brew sort of pub. It would be a nice change of place from the Islay bars, which offered usually no more than four varieties of beer and no fewer than forty types of whisky. It seemed like it was too far to walk, so we took a cab there and promptly realized that it was actually a reasonable distance from our hotel.

And here I went to law school, like a sucker.