Last year, my Dad proposed a trip of the MacDougall clan to Scotland and Ireland, and we were instantly on board. My brother Sean and I had been to London before as part of our backpack-around-Europe trip years before, but we had missed out on the rest of the British Isles. We spent several months planning, and finally decided on Edinburgh and Pitlochry in Scotland, and the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. We wanted to spend most of our time outside the big cities (through my travels, I've come to believe that get a better feel for a place in the countryside).
The group consisted of Dad, my brother Sean, Sarah, and my paternal uncle and aunt, Fred and Carol. Everyone flew to DC the day before, and mocked me for running a marathon just hours before an overnight trans-atlantic flight.
It was an odyssey to get to there, with a flight to Glasgow connecting in Iceland, and a train to Edinburgh. We got to our hotel jet-lagged and sore, but we knew we had picked the right place to start. Edinburgh is a neat city. It's got all the old buildings, a castle, and tons of history, but has a great assortment of bars, breweries, and interesting characters.
The elders of the clan took it easy for the evening, and Sarah, Sean, and I wandered around the city center. Edinburgh embraces it's weirdness (it's home to the Fringe Festival), and it was on full display with street performers and buskers. Sean got sucked into participating in a performance with a prime example of said weirdness, a fire eater and sword swallower!
Oh, fire. This should be good!
Down the hatch! For the crazy Scot, not Sean
At some point the shirt came off...
The next day we started out heading to Edinburgh Castle, right smack in the middle of city. The keep houses a great museum on Scottish military history, a war memorial, and some great artifacts from when the Scottish and British fought each other on a regular basis.
The clan..
Classic Edinburgh, right down to the kid with a guitar and a Ramones t-shirt!
Sarah poses in front of the great views (and strongly defensible position) of Edinburgh Castle
One large artifact next to another
After the castle, we all hit up a pub for some classic lunch fare: meat pies and scotch. The helpful barkeep set us up with some haggis pies and a great assortment of the country's most famous export.
So haggis gets a bad wrap, based only on the fact that it's comprised of sheep guts boiled in other sheep guts. It's actually pretty good, and I had it several times! The scotch, well, we had a lot of it, too.
After lunch we headed over to see the new Scottish Parliament building. A security guard took the time to talk to us about the self-governance aspects of Scotland. This was shortly after the independence vote, and despite the decision to stay with the UK, almost everyone we talked to was pro-independence. We then headed into a huge park that encompassed a tall bluff on the east side of town. It was a great hike with great views, and it felt like we disappeared from the city when we got to the interior.
Near the summit. The heather was in full bloom all around the Isles
We had a great dinner (more haggis for me) along the main promenade. You can keep your fancy French cuisine, we thought the food in Scotland was great. It consisted of hearty meals with lots of meat, great salmon, and large breakfasts. Even the items that sound horrible, like "blood pudding", were good.
Great sunset in the middle of town
The rest of the evening involved some bar hopping and lot more scotch. Sarah and Sean and I even discovered a craft brewery hidden on a side street. Turns out the craft beer revolution is coming to Great Britain as well. We even had a sip of BrewDogs's Tactical Nuclear Penguin (32% ABV!)
The next morning we took a car service out to the airport to rent a couple cars. I was the most apprehesive about this aspect of the trip. I just wasn't sure I would grasp driving on the wrong side of the road! We dealt with the same car rental nonsense as the States, and settled on a 9 seat sort of minibus. Great, now I could drive on the wrong side in a big tall euro-mobile. Dad was very clear that Sean and I would be handling the driving responsibilities on this trip (and we would find out later why this was a sound decision), and I used the fact that I had handled all the logistics to make Sean drive first. Sean tried to argue that we didn't need a GPS, then proved himself wrong by missing the very first turn, even with the device.
We made it out of town alive, and headed west for a stop in Stirling, home of the most historically significant castle in Scotland. Stirling Castle was well preserved and restored, and has some great artifacts from its own past.
Cadets of some sort in the courtyard
They do know how to pick their defensive positions
Me pretending to be a photographer
Sarah at the "Ladies' Lookout"
"What are you looking at, punk?"
From Stirling, we headed up to our base for the next few days, Pitlochry. After we perused Rick Steve's travel guide, we decided on this nice hamlet for it's proximity to the Highlands and several distilleries and several good restaurants. We stayed a great family run B + B, Atholl Villa, which provided a great Scottish breakfast of smoked salmon and blood pudding every morning.
Atholl Villa
Pitlochry's main drag
After check-in, we headed to our first distillery, Abernathy. While their single malt may not be a household name, you probably have heard of the blended Scotch that the malt is the main ingredient for, Dewar's. We had an informative tour from a happy gent in a kilt, and tasted several of their single malts.
Malts for blending on display
Employees personalize some of the barrels
The next day, Sarah, Sean, and I headed up to Cairgorms National Park for a hike in the highlands. This may have been the highlight of the trip for me. We drove in through the town of Aviemore, through a forest and past a couple beautiful lakes. We started our hike near a ski slope, and headed southeast to the top of Ben Macdui, the second highest peak in Britain. From there we headed west to the peak of Cairn Gorm. There was still plenty of snow in May, and the contrast with the treeless hills was beautiful. It was a tiring 10 mile hike that included some rock scrambling and route finding.
The next day all six of us headed back to Aviemore. We headed into Carigorms for some views of the mountains past the lake. We followed that up with a tour and tasting at Caringorms Brewery. Aviemore is a great little outdoorsy town that is the jumping off point for all sorts of activities in the park. I couldn't talk the rest into returning to Pitlochry via a series of windy mountain roads past the highest distillery in Scotland.
The clan at Loch Morlich
"Why is this duck here? I don't understand..."
Edinburgh, Cairngorms, and the villages of Scotland were wonderful, but we can't gloss over the scotch-tasting experience. All the bars and pubs had a great selection, and everyone was knowledgeable about the varied tastes and textures. I'd always preferred bourbon, thinking all scotches were smokey and harsh. I found a bunch of great tasting whiskeys with a wide variety of flavors.
After a great few days in Pitlochry, we survived me driving down to Edinburgh airport for a short flight to Ireland (note: for all those that bitch about the TSA, airport security in Europe sucks even worse, and appears to be less effective). Stay tuned for that blog!