Daily Archives: July 9, 2013

No rest for the wicked today:  it’s distillery tour day and we need to be up and out sharpish if we’re going to get to Speyside and the Cardhu or Cragganmore distilleries today.  Everyone is up and bathed and we are out of the flat by 7:40 and on the road north.  We stopped in Pitlochry for breakfast and realized that we still had 2 more hours to go.  By which time, we could spend 3 hours visiting and then back in the car for 3ish hours back.  Suddenly Speyside whiskeys  lost their appeal.  Quick change of plans and a new route typed into Posh Margaret (as we now call the GPS in the hire car) and 35 minutes later we are in Dalwhinnie, the highest inhabited village in Britain (at 350ish meters) with the coldest average temperature (year round average 6 degrees Celcius).  And home to the Dalwhinnie distillery.

We joined the 11 am tour and were guided through the “medium sized” operations (2.2 million liters produced each year) by an excellent tour guide.  Even though we have been to several distilleries in the past (this is at least our 6th), we learned things that we hadn’t heard before which was nice.  And most importantly…. drum roll please… I actually liked the whiskey!  After dozens of attempts, I have found a whiskey that I actually find palatable – enough so that I even finished Gillian’s dram!  It’s very light and sweet and not like something Frank would drink.  So he didn’t buy it – or at least not the standard 15 year old since we can get it at home.  He did buy the distiller’s edition which goes through a secondary aging in sherry casks which changes the character completely.  He also bought a bottle of the Cragganmore Distiller’s Edition (since they are owned by the same conglomerate) which is stronger than I care for as well.  I sense a plan here….

We spent some time having a mini picnic in the sunshine on the distillery grounds (jam rolls and crisps) before deciding on our next stop.  Since we knew we were due back in Stirling for 6 o’clock, we decided to stay somewhat local and headed for Bruar Falls which is on the nearby Blair Atholl estate. It was starting to get really warm out so we traded in our jeans for lighter weight clothes and headed up the trail to the falls.  It was a lovely walk and I would have been very happy to have done the whole 2 mile loop but the Perthshire flies apparently love Gillian so we couldn’t stay as long as we might have wanted.

Back to Pitlochry for a bar lunch and another wander through woolen mill shops to no avail.  Then onto Aberfeldy, just because it was there but it didn’t hold any interest for us so we started down the very narrow track, which I can’t believe is an A road, along the side of Loch Tay to Killin.  One of my favorite villages in Stirlingshire, it sits at the base of Loch Tay and is home to the Falls of Dochart. We have photos of the kids playing in the falls when they were much younger and we didn’t spend much time here but did wanted to stop for a bit to cool off.

Because it was bloody hot today!  I mean like Washington DC or Italy hot!  Apparently Strathallan in Perthshire (very close to where we were ) hit 29 degrees Celcius – or 84 degrees Fahrenheit – and was the hottest place in Scotland.  For some reason 29 in Scotland seemed far hotter than 29 in Italy.  We were melting, and apparently so was the rest of the country.  We saw people outside in various states of undress and everyone seemed to be eating ice cream.  Scottish dairies must be loving this!

We sped back to town (windows down of course – I refuse to use AC in Scotland!) in time for a large family gathering at Tom and Una’s including a visit from Auntie Jean.  Another copious quantity of Indian take away was consumed before we headed out for the evening. Tomorrow, we have no agenda so maybe I’ll get a run in before we do nothing of significance.

Steps taken: 11, 405 or about 5 miles (20 times that spent in the car)

Number of days in a row Andy Murray has been on the front page of most papers: 3

(In case you wanted to experience his win as Duncan and Gillian did, here’s a sound clip of the noise in the Tappit Hen.)