Dalwhinnie Whiskey Distillery in the Highlands of Scotland

Oct 27, 2004

We had to be up and out of the room early that morning, but we were able to grab some coffee, and thankfully my stomach was feeling much better.

We headed North to the Blair Castle, stopping along the way for pictures, and to drop off letters at a small post office. As it turned out we should have stayed to another course. Blair Castle is not the sort of place you can simply take photos of from your car. They have a gate fee that tourists must pay, on top of paid tours or paid activities that they offer.

Considering we'd only planned to make a brief stop there we decided against spending any time at the location, and instead headed far up into the Highlands of Scotland for a tour of the Dalwhinnie Scotch Whiskey distillery. That was much more interesting by far, considering we were getting a little burned out on the standard castle/museum/cathedral tours.

From Dalwhinnie we headed straight up to Loch Ness (what tour of Scotland doesn't include a few pictures of that infamous location?). We shot loads of pictures, toured the nearby shops and had lunch at a nice restaurant near the shoreline.

As it was getting dark we had to move quickly to get back into the car and race back south. The roads were terrifying at night, to say the least. On the map it looked nice and straight, but in reality it was insanely serpentine. To make it even more frightening, you would drive around a sharp corner and find out that the road narrowed to one and a half lanes instead of a two car roadway. At one point we were just entering one of those narrowed areas just as a large truck approached from the opposite direction.
The truck was as wide as the narrow road just by itself, and if he hadn't slowed down to let us by he would have scraped us right off into the trees.

We were all exhausted from stress over the drive when we finally arrived in Glascow, only to find out that all the hotels were booked! We searched from Glascow to Troon to Prestwick and couldn't find anything available. Miserable and exhausted we gave up at the last hotel we were turned away from. They had an entire wedding party filling them up to the rafters, and we just didn't have the strength to go on. Moving the car into a discreet corner of their parking lot, we curled up in our seats and tried to get what little sleep we could. It was cold, cramped and miserable.


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