July 19 –
I couldn’t get in my run this morning due to the persistent rain and drizzle (very Scottish weather this morning!) and there was nothing crucial on the agenda for this morning so we were all fairly lazy. I am becoming a regular at the coffee shop down the road (where there’s wifi!) as I seem to be incapable of sleeping past 7 a.m. no matter how hard I try! Once we got everyone up and about, Frank and I made arrangements for his mum to use the gift certificate we gave her for her birthday. So tomorrow my mother-in-law and I will get our nails done in the morning, then have some lunch before she goes for a facial in the afternoon. Very posh!
Once those details had been worked out, we bundled up the nuclear family and four of us headed north to go to Drum Castle just outside Aberdeen. Unfortunately, we got a very late start and somewhere north of Perth (Blairgowrie actually) we abandoned that plan and headed west toward Pitlochry. These are the single track winding roads of which my spouse is so fond! At several points, we came across fields where there was no fence to keep in the sheep so they were wandering all over the road – I’ll need to upload some pictures from Gillian’s camera. There was heather everywhere and the clouds were actually low enough to touch the hills around us. Talk about raw, stark beauty.
After some serious driving for Frank (I heard several “wheeeee”s escape his lips), we came across the Edradour distillery – the smallest one in Scotland. So we went in for the tour. Although we’ve toured distilleries before – we visited Talisker on Skye last time – this one was different because of its size. They have 3 men who work there to make whiskey and 17 tour guides! Their annual output is about 90,000 litres whereas the largest distilleries produce more than 10 million! The entire process is done by hand in one building. It really was fascinating! Frank succumbed to the charms of a 12 year old cask strength aged in port wood. Now we have to figure out how to get it home!
Then on to Pitlochry to wander about a bit more and have some ice cream before heading home the long way… the A827 along the shores of Loch Tay which is really beautiful especially when the sun is out. No such luck for us today but still it is a breathtaking drive. We stopped briefly in Killin – one of our favorite places because of the Falls of Dochart – but the menu at the restaurant we were contemplating was a bit too fancy for the kids. (Duncan didn’t like the look of the the smoked wood pigeon on the specials board!) So we pushed on to Callendar and had a “normal” bar supper at the River Inn: roast beef for Frank, gammon steak for Gillian and I, chicken and mushroom pie for Duncan.
Frank went for a night out with the lads – I don’t know any details and that’s fine with me. The kids and I had a quiet night in – I have the new Jasper Fforde book to work on before Harry Potter comes out in a day or two.
/san/
[Pedometer: 12,540 or about 6 miles]
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