We took a quick flight from London to Edinburgh and immediately hiked up Arthur's Seat to get a good view of the city. The elevation gain to start this hike is one of a couple times where my foot started to not feel great (spoiler: it was broken for the entirety of the trip). The view was great tho, so definitely worth it at the time. Another element we were particularly excited about was the varying styles of travel for this trip. Typically it's fly somewhere, rent a car, bop around, fly home. We'd have a couple ferry and train rides this trip, starting with a ferry to Islay.
We took the ferry from Kennacraig to Port Ellen, with food, drink, and decent views the trip was pleasant and novel, but not much to write home about. After dropping everything off at our Air BnB we popped over for a pint and a dram at the only open establishment: The Ardview Inn. This was our first exposure to unintelligible English being spoken with thick (and inebriated) Scottish accents. Brian smiled the entire time.
I was getting up early and enjoying the presence of coffee rather than tea thus far, which sparked me to pour over a few pages of 'Peat Smoke and Spirit' before everyone got moving, and I'll quote it a couple times before our Scottish tale is thru:
“From where we sleep, London, Paris and Frankfurt are elementally indistinguishable: cities of the plain, stiff with concrete, maggoty with traffic, noisy with need. Here is elsewhere.”
We started our scotch tour at Ardbeg and I was most surprised by the lack of smoke or peaty presence in the dram. The tasting was much closer to bourbon than what I would have expected, and this remind true for our time on Islay. Just for ease of recall, we'll jot down the tastes here otherwise they'll be lost in time: 10 year, An Oa, & Corryvrekan. At Lagavulin we were able to see where the peat was used to smoke the malt barley and enjoy the 8 year, 12 year sherry cask, and the 14. Lagavulin is also where we learned of the "smokey cokey" (mixing scotch and coke, but never their scotch of course).
Leaving Islay by means of the ferry again, we were asked, "have you been on this ferry before?" Before we could even respond, they repeated, "THIS ferry?" It turns out, our first ride over was the outdated model still in production. For the ride back, it was bougie. Gatsby himself would have been proud of the decor and accommodations. After enjoying a haggis and cheese sandwich we hiked thru the Glen Nevis estate, taking Paddy's bridge trail to the lower falls.
After stopping at Ellean Donan Castle we started looking for the best locations to get up close and personal with highland cows. So, it turns out on the way into Portree (which is where we were headed) there is a place called Hectors where they have feed stations for the coos (cows) right off the road. In Ireland it was puffins, but in Scotland the coos brought home the blue ribbon. Riding the high from the coos, we took the Camastianavaig and Ben tianavaig trail over the bay. This hike started with a little cupboard near the trailhead that had small cakes and pastries inside! You could Venmo or drop off cash for the items, but this is a trend I would love to see take off everywhere.
We stayed that evening on the Isle of Skye with high aspirations for the Old Man of Storr hike. We were up early and at the lot before 8a to beat the crowds, and it was a beautiful morning. The parking lot was clear with great visibility. Unfortunately, we hiked straight up into the dense fog then constant rain with no visibility. This sparks another quote from the 'Peat Smoke and Spirit' book: "on a clear day you can see your own furniture." Up at that viewpoint we'd be lucky to see even that. My foot was slowing down again with the elevation gain on the first hike, so rather than do our long (and potentially shut down by weather hike) we opted for a more casual "fairy pool" hike among cascading waterfalls.
That ended up being more than enough and gave us the opportunity to stop at the Redburn Cafe which had.... more highland coos! Here we met Martha who was a sassy one who turned up missing for a couple months only to return, and with child! Her sass was front and center when head butting other coos so that she could be the only one to be hand fed snacks.
After the fairy pools we needed to relax a bit and refuel our pixie dust. We bopped around Inverness enjoying Uilebheist's mostly beers even tho they are labeled a distillery. Their highland storm session IPA with apricots, peach, and mango was worth walking from Kentucky for.
Glenfiddich was going thru renovations while we were there, so unfortunately our tour had more video presence than physically seeing the grounds but it was still lovely. The one thing they did touch on that others avoided, is offsetting environmental damage caused by harvesting and burning peat in the scotch making process. One other fun fact they brought to the table was they would walk trained dogs thru the rick houses to smell sulfur and ethanol to try and mitigate any barrel that is souring or over-oaking. At their tasting we enjoyed - 12, 15 solera, 18 (grown up 12), and the 21 reserve. Aberlour was also more of a tasting than a tour, but wonderful as well. Here we enjoyed - 11, Sherry 11, 12 double casked, Casg Annamh.
