Hitting the Whisky Trail & Another Castle

WEDNESDAY & THURSDAY August 29 & 30

Wednesday was another of those ugly weather days that seems to happen about every other day. We were not inspired to jump in the car and head out to another vista.  Instead, we relaxed at home and did a little local drive to Inveruie in search of a few groceries.  We found the local Tesco - which is a very big supermarket chain around here.  It was, indeed, huge - to the point of overwhelming compared to our Mexican supermarkets.  We didn't need much but we were in search of fresh salmon and we found it!  We purchased our dinner in the raw - lovely fresh salmon fillets which were on special and very inexpensive.  I prepared a simple dinner of sauteed salmon, buttered noodles and a chopped lettuce and tomato salad with Cesar dressing.  The entire dinner took about 30 minutes to prepare - my kind of cooking while on vacation. And, of course, a nice bottle of red wine (we didn't have any white).  The salmon was among the best we have ever had - the last good salmon we had was in Seattle and this was equal or better.  Naturally, I photographed it:

We spent the rest of the evening watching the Opening Ceremony of the Paralympics which was very impressive.  We stayed up long enough to watch the Mexican team parade in and they were by far the most colorful team and a lot of them.

Thursday morning we awoke to a day with promise weather-wise.  It was not perfect but a definite improvement over yesterday.  Our destination was to the northwest - Castle Ballinballoch.  However, as we studied the map, we realized that we were on the road to Whisky (yes, that is the correct spelling in Scotland) distillery country and right on the way was Glenffidich.  We certainly were not going to pass that up.  The roads, as usual were narrow and the signs were few but armed with a good map, we did quite well and after an hour or so of fabulous scenery, hills, greenery, sheep, forests, quaint villages and lively rivers, we arrived at Glenfiddich.  We were just in time for the next tour of just about 10 people.  We learned all about the MacPherson-Grant family who started the distillery in 1887 - building it on this very site stone by stone in one year.  Glenfiddich is one of the few Whisky companies who have stayed in the same family to this day.  The descendants are still running the company in the same location with the same ingredients.  The tour was interesting and at the end we sampled the 12, 15 & 18 yr old whisky - all quite different.  I had a little extra because John was driving. Tee-hee.

From there, we drove a bit farther looking for the castle.  Wouldn't you know it, we took another wrong turn and ended up not knowing exactly where we were until we pulled over and studied the map.  As it turned out, we were in pretty much the right area - just took a different road than we thought we took.  So, we found the castle and pulled into the parking lot.  The weather now was beautiful - blue skies and puffy sheep-like clouds.  This castle is one of the few that has been continually occupied by the family of the original owner.  In this case - the Grant family (no relation to the Glenfiddich Grants - I asked).  The castle is lovely and the grounds are magnificent - the immense lawn looks like a putting green.

We paid our fee (7 pounds concession for old folks) and were free to wander the rooms which were open to the public.  They were quite wonderful with amazing art and antiques throughout.  The rooms we saw are mostly used by the family outside of public hours.  The 2 lovely guest rooms we saw were currently in use by actual guests (so we were told by the attendant at the entrance).  The dining room was magnificent and she said they were going to be using this evening.  They had lots of family photos and pictures of the royal family who they know personally.  After our self guided tour - and there were only a half dozen other people there - we had a little snack in the Tea and Gift Shop before our journey back home.  On the way back we enjoyed the scenery again and only made a couple of wrong turns.  We agreed that Scotland gets a "D" for signage.  There are no speed limit signs except when coming into a village - there is no warning of an intersection coming up and there are no highway number signs other than at major intersections.  However, the scenery cannot be beat and there are no billboards or any other signs of advertising.

Now - here is a link to my photos from today - WARNING THERE ARE A LOT OF THEM but you don't have to look at all of them.  However, the scenery is really fabulous.  I put them all up there for me - permanent storage on the Internet.