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.

Day Five: Thwarted by an Angry Sea

You have no idea how thrilled I am about the title of this post.

Day Five was a day spent mostly in transit and with little photographic evidence of its occurrence. Let it be said that it was again an exceedingly long day: we left the Islay Hotel before 6am and ended the evening in Glasgow. Day Five was an exercise in keeping our tempers, adjusting our plans, and forever questing for a proper American cheeseburger in Scotland.

And, of course, we managed to fit a distillery into the mix.

Auchentoshan

Day Four: Last Night on Islay

The evening of night four was our last night in Islay. I know that these entries have mostly focused on our daytime activities. This is partially because we spent our nights involved in a glamorous ring of underground criminals, but also partially because nights on Islay are usually a bit tame and not terribly photogenic. None the less, in the opposite manner of the last post (a mass of words rather than pictures), I've included a bit of what we actually did in the evenings during our time on Islay.

(all the pictures in this post are courtesy of E)

Day Four: Even More Adventures on Jura

After our mediocre lunch (the food quieted the alcohol, but led to further confirmation of the fact that Scotland and the US have a very different definition of what precisely constitutes a cheeseburger), E and I had an awkward bit of time to kill. The last ferry for Islay left around 6, and we rather needed to be on it, but it was only a little before 4. Jura, in the downtown area, is a very economical, small sort of place. There is precisely one of everything: one distillery, one hotel (with one restaurant), one bistro and one shop. Beyond that, I'm sure there are plenty of adventures to be had, but very few of them were likely to be had in under 2 hours worth of time with no planning. So, since the sun had come out, we decided to content ourselves with walking a ways up the road, as it bordered the ocean on one side and was quite pretty.

I found much to delight me on this road. I'm sure it was a combination of a lingering intoxication and the joys of familiarity because, to me, Jura looked particularly like Maine. And I adore Maine. So I charmingly insisted on stopping about every three feet of our walk to take more and more pictures of Jura. And now I will similarly charmingly inflict these pictures upon others.

Day Four: Adventures on Jura

Jura is an island across from Islay. It's not that much smaller (actually, I have no idea if it even IS smaller than Islay) and very sparsely populated: fewer than 200 people according to the 2011 census. The number of red deer is less certain but thought to be at least triple the human population. I was prepared for something rather boring and desolate, but what I found was absolutely enchanting.

Day Four: Lagavulin

The next stop on our journey of distilleries is the home of the preferred beverage of Ron Swanson: Lagavulin.

Since we had seen just about enough washbacks and stills to last a lifetime, E had booked us for a warehouse tasting at Lagavulin. When we arrived, the interior was appropriately Swanson-esque, furnished in dark plaid armchairs, wooden tables, fine oil paintings and lots of leather. It was like Ron Burgundy's dream library in there.

Day Four: Kildalton Cross

Before our appointment at Lagavulin for some early morning getting sloshed, we decided to take in some culture and go see the Kildalton Cross. The Kildalton Cross dates back to approximately 800 A.D. making it super old and super cool. It was a gray morning, shockingly enough, but we were able to poke around the cross and church area for a good while. 

Day Three: It's Good to Have Land

When you sign up a Friend of Laphroaig (a loyalty program) you receive certain benefits. One of these is a lifelong lease on a tiny plot of land in Islay. This is a real plot of land. It comes with coordinates, and everything. Of course, E has his own plot. And we were not going to let a perfectly good trip to Islay pass without a visit to his own property, which, as we could best determine, was somewhere in the middle of this field:

It was not as easy a task as it seemed.

Day Three: Confronting Ancient Fears

I'd like to say that I'm generally a fearless and brave person. However, that would be flagrantly untrue. I am afraid of many and various things including bees, unemployment, dying alone, being eaten by a bear, failing out of law school, not failing out of law school and accidentally eating raw onions. Amongst those many fears is a fear of kayaking.

I have no idea where my fear of kayaking comes from. The rest of my stupid fears at least have a root cause in something. Bears eat you. That sucks. Failing out of law school would bring shame and humiliation. NOT failing out of law school may lead to being a lawyer. Logical progressions, you know? But, none the less, I have long been afraid of kayaking. The fact that my mother adores kayaking does not help. Enough of thirteen year old me exists somewhere inside that I rebel strenuously against enjoying anything my mother strongly recommends.

So, when it was raining as we left Ardbeg, I was relieved. Because if it rained too much, we wouldn't have to go sea-kayaking. And I had promised. I had promised to try and be brave, and I would probably end up being brave, but, you know, a well timed downpour and cancellation wouldn't hurt anyone.

I was not, however, so lucky. And soon, I'd be in this:

Day Three: Ardbeg

Wednesday morning, we continued our Islay distillery experience at Ardbeg. I didn't really know much about Ardbeg before we visited. I mean, I didn't know much about any of these places before we visited but I really didn't expect what we walked into at Ardbeg.

The morning we visited Ardbeg, it was rainier than usual. Like not just misting or showering but properly raining for a while. That, amongst probably a slight bit of laziness, is why there are somewhat fewer pictures of Ardbeg than Laphroaig  Also, we took a standard tour at Ardbeg, not a four hour epic experience.

It's not exactly black letters on a white wall, but it'll do. 

Day Two: Laphroaig Water to Whisky, Part 2

After we finished the distillery tour, we were able to go into the Laphroaig warehouse. Although we were separated from the precious whisky by bars and all that, we were able to bottle our own whisky from one of three selected casks here, as well as sample all the casks beforehand.

Adventures in the warehouse to continue.

Day Two: Laphroaig - Water to Whisky Part 1

Trying to describe E's observable mental state before visiting Laphroaig is a bit difficult. Take one part excited child on Christmas Eve, one part exiled immigrant finally allowed to see his homeland again and add a slight dusting of pure euphoria and you might sort of come somewhere close to the emotional state of my traveling companion on the morning of our second day on Islay as our Water to Whisky tour loomed in the ever more near future.

There's really no other picture that I can use for the title page of this post besides perhaps E's best panorama of the whole trip. Seriously, you owe it to yourself to actually click on and enlarge this one:

Also, just an advance warning: this tour was amazing. This post WILL be long.

Day Two: LK's First Distillery

Our second day on Islay had an adventurous itinerary - we were touring the Bowmore distillery in the morning, driving about 15-20 minutes to Port Ellen and then doing an all afternoon Water to Whisky tour at Laphroaig  The plan was then to stumble the mile or so back to our hotel and try not to die of alcohol poisoning. The weather forecast was, as it was for almost every day on Islay, around 60 degrees with an intermittent chance of rain.

There's no gray hoodie or white warehouse, but it'll do. 

Day One: Bowmore

On the evening of our first day on Islay, we spent our time wandering around the Bowmore region. We had worried that our hotel would be a bit far from the Bowmore Distillery, where we were scheduled to tour the next morning, but when, after a five minute walk, we saw this, our fears were assuaged handily.

Day One: The Journey to Islay

Day one was, in my defense, a really long day. It began around noon EST on Monday and we didn't make it to Islay until 3pm Scottish time on Tuesday. So, I promise, there will not be several separate posts for every day of our trip. I'm not that devoted of a navel gazer.

By this point in our journey, I was involuntarily falling asleep about every five minutes. All credit to E for staying awake enough to actually drive - had I been behind the wheel, we doubtless would be dead at the bottom of an extremely picturesque loch. Our destination was the ferry at Kennacraig, which would take us on a magical two hour journey to Islay. Most of these pictures are credited to E, since I spent most of the time waiting for the ferry pretending to read and secretly catnapping when he wasn't looking.

This was our transport - rather a solid sort of boat. 

Day One: Inveraray Castle

The real impetus for our pit stop in Argyll was a hope to stop at Inveraray Castle. We reached the castle an hour before it opened, so we headed back to town and returned at ten. I didn't really know much about the history of the castle, and honestly, I still don't know a great deal, except that it is awesome and it is owned by the Campbell family, who still live and raise their children there. Parts of the castle are open to the public for tours, and, promptly at 10am, E and I trooped in with the buses of early morning tourists to get an idea of what it'd be like to live in a proper castle.

Inveraray Castle: Part 2 in the series of epic Scottish panoramas by E.

Day One: Trial By Fire (And Fog): Argyll

In which our intrepid narrator and erstwhile companion conquer two planes, a screaming baby, backwards driving directions and the ever-present rain to emerge victorious and be rewarded with breakfast and a bell tower.

A statue in Argyll. Of who? I don't know. Walking that far seemed hard. 

More details forthcoming after the cut..

Introduction

Two weeks ago, I went to Scotland with E, a guy I've known for a few months. We rambled about the country via four separate ferries, a handful of taxis and one very small but effective Peugeot. Our trip was centered around doing as much as two people possibly can in eight days without driving each other to suicide, homicide, fratricide, or whisky-cide (a term that I invented for if I had, in a fit of blind rage, hurt the whisky. This would be followed shortly by homicide. My homicide. At the hands of E).

Since I knew I'd be doing my best to saturate my few remaining brain cells with alcohol, I made it a point to take a ton of pictures throughout our adventures. Due to said saturation and eventual death of said brain cells, and to tell friends & family about our trip without actually making them listen to me drone at them for hours upon hours, I've put together this blog. You might think that I've rather overdone the photos, but, all in all, we took 357 on my camera alone. Trust me. You're getting off easy.

Enjoy! 

Man on Bench in Argyll. I assume he's being contemplative.