Posted on by markusoreallyus · 1 Comment

A quiet day in Speyside

This will be a relatively short post. I was feeling unambitious today. It’s two weeks since I left Vancouver, and tomorrow will be two weeks since I arrived here. Maybe that has something to do with it. I’m having a great time in Scotland, as I did in Ireland, but I’m missing my wife, my friends and family, even my cat. About the only thing I’m not missing to some degree is the daily commute to and from the North Shore. I also miss the variety of foods on offer in Vancouver. Here, most places offer variations on a theme. Maybe that will change in Edinburgh.

That sounded complainy. It shouldn’t. As I said above, I’M HAVING A GREAT TIME here. There are just things I miss about home. And the main one is Adele.

One thing they have in abundance here, but which we don’t have at all back home, is malt whisky distilleries. I could spend a week just visiting distilleries in the Speyside region, and still not get to all of them. Given that I can’t do everything – I never did get to John o’ Groats, for example – I’ve had to be selective. To date, I’ve toured two distilleries: Glenmorangie, which I wrote about a couple of days ago, and earlier today, Glenfiddich, which was my father’s favourite.

The Glenmorangie tour was very good. The Glenfiddich tour was excellent.

They’ve been making Glenfiddich for about 120 years in Dufftown, and it’s still owned by the same family, and largely made the same way they began in 1887. Like most other distilleries, they no longer malt their own barley, but buy it from maltings. Unlike most other distilleries, they have their own cooperage on site, and do their own bottling. They now sell to 184 of the 196 countries on earth, which makes them the biggest of the single malt whiskies on the planet.

Biggest isn’t always best, and to be honest, although I like Glenfiddich, especially the 18 year old expression, I’m more of an Islay malt guy. I like a bit of peat. Ok, a lot of peat. And even among the Speyside (and other Highland) malts, it’s not my first choice. Not far down the list, but not the top, either. (Sadly, The Glenrothes doesn’t have tours, or even a visitor centre, at their distillery.) But as they say, there are two kinds of single malt whiskies: good ones, and better ones. Glenfiddich belongs in the better group, just not necessarily at the top.

I do think it’s cool, though, how many of their employees are lifers. They have one cooper, for example, who’s been with them for 50 years.

And their tour would be hard to beat, even by a whisky I prefer. (Laphroaig and Lagavulin, Bowmore and Bruichladdich, Ardbeg and Bunnahabhain, among the Islays I’ve sampled.) It was surprising how different their approach is to whisky than, say, Glenmorangie. Using wooden washbacks, for example. (Made from Douglas Fir from British Columbia – just saying.) Or the fact they age their whiskies in both sherry and bourbon barrels for the full 12 (or more) years, and then blend those together to make their end products, rather than using bourbon barrels exclusively for the first ten years, and then “finishing” their whisky in sherry (or port, or Sauternes) barrels.

As I went their on the bike, I couldn’t partake of the tasting at the end. Scotland’s drink-driving rules are even stricter than those in British Columbia. The legal limit is 0.02, which is as close to zero as you can get and still have a test. Careful what mouthwash you use here! They gave me a wee bottle of the 12 to take with me.

The tour lasts 90 minutes, and afterwards I didn’t really see the point of visiting another distillery today, so I rode off into Cairngorms National Park. I didn’t set a destination on the GPS, just followed the road that led into the park on the assumption that all roads lead to somewhere. This one certainly did. Not only did I pass the Glenlivet distillery on the way to the road, it led me (after close to an hour) past the Tomintoul distillery, too.

The beautiful little B road also led me through some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever ridden through. I stopped and took pictures along the way, although I haven’t transferred them over from the camera yet, so you’ll just have to take my word for it for now. It ran beside the Avon and Spey rivers (at different points, of course), through farmland filled with cattle and sheep, along steep hills and through green valleys.

And of course, like all roads, it did lead to somewhere, in this case to a junction with another, larger road, which ultimately brought me back to Elgin.

Tomorrow I’ll be off to Edinburgh, where I’ll meet up with my friend Gillian for a while. After that, I’ll be down to England and Wales. I can’t believe my time in Scotland is almost at an end! It’s been fantastic. The only thing that could make it better is having Adele here with me. Next time!

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 5 Comments

You take the high road

I don’t know if the A77 qualifies as ‘the low road’, but I’m in Scotland right now, on the bonny bonny banks of Loch Lomond. Well, across the street, anyway. I can see it out my hotel room window. What the hell do you want?

This trip has been amazing so far. Ireland (all of it) gave me more than I had hoped for, and I wished I never had to leave. I felt so at home there. I’d have been even sadder to leave, though, if I hadn’t been looking forward to Scotland so much. Scotland, after all, was really the beginning of this trip – or, at least, the premeditation of it.

Originally, Adele suggested I tag along for the start of my friend Scott’s trip (he’s going for much longer – six months!). Scott, in turn, suggested I might want to meet him part way through, since he was going to be spending the first week or so visiting his ex’s family in England. I thought about it, and it occurred to me that I could, instead, spend that time riding around Scotland, and we could meet up when it was convenient to both of us. That was the start of the idea. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, and thought, I might as well add Ireland, if I’m over there. And I’ve never been to Wales, either. Or to England, outside of London and a day trip to Cambridge. Gradually, the whole thing began to take on a shape very different from tagging along for part of someone else’s adventure.

So, this morning, I woke up in Northern Ireland. Looked at the time on my phone. And went back to sleep. Seriously, who gets up before six on a holiday? Eventually, I got up and set about packing up my things and loading the bike back up. I’m becoming gradually more efficient with how I load the Triumph bags, which are quite a bit smaller than the Happy Trails cases on my GS. Still, squeezing them closed is always a bit tricky.

I shaved, ate some cereal for breakfast, made some coffee, and cleaned up after myself. At a little after ten I was on my way to the Belfast ferry terminal to catch the Stena Line to Cairnryan. I stopped off for coffee on the way, and a few other bikers pulled up and we chatted. I asked if they were taking the ferry across, or just stopping for breakfast. It was the latter. They asked where I was off to, and where I was from. Essentially, they were politely sussing out whether or not I was an American. This happens a lot, and it always seems to relieve people to hear I’m Canadian, after which they mutter something about the ridiculous orange catastrophe in the White House. One of them mentioned he had relatives in Toronto. I told them I lived as far away from that as they do from Berlin, which is a pretty big understatement, actually, but still impressed them.

Anyway, they told me about journeys they’d done – the tallest bridge in the world, somewhere in the south of France – and told me I had to go to the Glenfiddich distillery. I often ignore these kinds of suggestions, but I may take this one, since it was my father’s favourite whisky.

Soon it was time for me to get to the ferry, so I said goodbye to them, put my helmet back on, and fired up the tiger. It’s an excellent bike, and I’ve largely gotten over most of my minor dislikes. I’ve learned to deal with the clusterfuck of controls operated by the left thumb, for example. I still think, given the choice, I’d pick a GS over a Tiger, but it would be a close decision, and the trade offs are real. The Tiger is just so much more zippy. Thank god for the cruise control, or I’d likely rack up a lot of fines.

The ferry ride was efficient, comfortable and pleasant, and there really isn’t much more to say about it than that. The food was far better than on the ferries back home.

Riding up the A77 toward Glasgow, I was impressed by how different the landscape and flora in Scotland are from Ireland. Scotland is just as beautiful as Ireland, certainly, but it feels more fierce about it. By turns lush and austere, there is little middle ground (in my extremely limited experience) where things are merely pretty. There were stretches that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in southwestern Alberta, if not for their proximity to a very large body of water. Others were more like my home province of British Columbia. Perhaps this is why western Canada is so full of Scottish place names. The rest of Canada, too, for that matter.

A little more than two and half hours after docking, I was here. In a hotel facing Loch Lomond. As I write, I’m watching the sunset colour the clouds in the east and cast shadows over the loch. Once again, the threat of weather hasn’t come to be. I’ve had sunshine pretty much the whole day.

A little while ago, I had dinner in the hotel bar. The most enormous piece of battered cod I’ve ever seen with excellent chips, a couple of pints of bitter, and for dessert, a dram of 18 year old Glenfiddich. Tomorrow I’ll be off to Inverness, which I’m going to use as a base from which to launch excursions into the Highlands over the next few days: to Bealach na Ba, John o’ Groats, Fort William, probably Dufftown and Tain (for distilleries) and wherever else I get a notion to go. As the signs at the edge of towns here say, Haste ye back!

****

P.s. – I want to thank all the readers who are following along, clicking like, commenting, or just reading. I know many of you, but there are obviously strangers in the mix – from Japan, Mexico, India, and Cameroon (!), among other places. I’m happy to get your feedback, if you feel like giving it. If you’d rather just read anonymously, that’s cool, too.