It started at breakfast with Matt's kippers. We all had to try them. Delicious if you ignore the tiny bones. My porridge had pepper in it. I was unsure if it went well with the honey and strawberry jam.
I did not have to go back for my walking sticks. I did not have to fiddle too much with my clothing right at the start. Essentially, we started off before 10:00, an auspicious beginning to our 13-mile walk.
The first thing we wanted to do was go by the local high school because Jessica had seen a postcard of a big turreted house that was the high school. Our walk took us right past the high school, or so it said on the map. Sure enough, there it was. What the heck? Instead of a Victorian wonder, it was a concrete and charmless structure, not unlike many high schools in Portland. It was one of the many puzzling things about today.
As yesterday, the walk was on mostly on easy surfaces. Four years ago, we walked the Coast to Coast Walk with Frank, Mary and Jonathan. Most of the time the path wasn't even marked. We were slogging in the rain on rocky, precarious surfaces or boggy, springy ones or on narrow ledges. There was a much more makeshift appearance to that walk. The Speyside Way walk is well-signed, well-maintained, and so far has mostly been on paved roads or level dirt roads or not-so-rocky paths.
Nevertheless, we felt it was our right to whine. The second day is always the hardest. Everything aches from the day before. Sometimes your boots don't really want to take the walk with you; they'd rather stay home where their leather can rest. Our second day also entailed two steep climbs. Granted they were on paved roads (in other words, qwitcher whining), but our muscles are not built up enough yet to make it easy going.
Also, it drizzled (for about 1 minute), hailed (for about 5 seconds), was hot one minute and cold the next 32 minutes. I must have added an hour onto our walk time by having to stop and put on jackets, hats, and gloves or take them off. Little did I know that if I had toughed it out, the weather would have changed within minutes.
This brings us to our other problem: premature activation.
After a particularly stiff and wet (okay, it drizzled for five minutes that time) climb up to the ridgeline, we decided to have lunch. We could not find a good place to sit. The grass was wet, the verge was too narrow, there wasn't a flat surface, whine, whine. We came to a mound of what we hoped was sand and not an anthill (see facsimile picture below). It was not level, but we propped the food up as best we could and ate on the mound, looking at scenery remarkably similar to the Pacific Northwest's. Revived, we walked about a quarter of a mile, walked around a bend in the road, and there was a picnic table -- out in the middle of nowhere. Trees had obviously been cut or trimmed in front of the table so there was a great view of the charming, very Scottish valley below. (It did not look at all like something you would find in the Pacific Northwest.)
Later, almost into town we needed a bathroom. We're not kidding you that if we had wanted to go while we walked through the forest, we would have had to have climbed a vertiginous slope to our left or climbed over barbed wire and into a pasture with a bull (complete with warning on the fence, "Beware of the bull") to our right. Hmm, we'll wait. Which brings us to the edge of town. Civilization, we exclaimed, when we spotted the first building, and it was a bar! Unfortunately, it was not open. So it was behind the big red deserted shed for a little private communing with nature instead. Relieved -- :) -- we continued on into town, only to find that a mere 200 feet away from our makeshift bathroom was a beautiful public one in a beautiful miniature park. We need to work on our timing, obviously.
During our walk we met some forestry workers and they had a spunky little terrier with them. His name was Tim, his owner said. "Dim," is what his friends called the dog. Not the sharpest pin in the cushion. What endeared him to us is that he took one look at Tom from afar and came on a dead run to him, wagging his tail and wanting to take Tom home with him. Besides, he was cute as a button. (Sorry, no picture of the endearing Tim because this was one of the rainy stretches when I put my camera away.)
Craigellachie (pronounced Craig-AL-ecky) is a cute, small village. It is just what we wanted to see. Plus, there's a distillery in town. The hotel's bar proudly serves about 150 whiskys (no "e"), the hotel just down the street serves 500. I'm where I was meant to be.
I ordered two versions of the local whisky (called Craigellachie, after the town), one 8 years old and one 15. I liked the cheaper, younger one better. I passed both glasses around and Jessica liked the second one better. So she and Matt took care of what I didn't drink.
For dinner, Matt ordered the strangest thing on the menu, again. This time it was chicken stuffed with haggis. (See picture below.)
Then we all pigged out on a shared serving of sticky toffee pudding with ice cream. It was wonderful!
I slowly climbed up two flights of stairs to my room. I'm done and done in. A short five-mile walk tomorrow to a whisky town, Dufftown. Yay! on both counts, it's a short walk and it's to a whisky town.
Kippers for breakfast
On the way out of town, we saw this McMansion (compared to its neighbors). We knew it was a castle because Snow White was outside.
We didn't know that this would be our last glimpse of the Spey for a while. The walk turned inland and at one point it was one mile from the Spey!
Part of the walk was on a road through farmland. Chicks and sheep and cows better scurry! We amused ourselves by saying that Sean Connery lived in that house, no that house, etc., each one grander than the last.
Here's one of Sean Connery's cows.
This derelict stone cottage was surrounded by daffodils. It was sooo beautiful. Want to buy a derelict cottage?
See the smaller mound? That looks like what we sat on to eat our lunch, only ours had weeds on it and was wet.
This is the picnic table (and view) about a quarter mile away. Arrrgh.
This was a mystery. There was a bird in the cage. Why was there a bird in the case sitting on a ball? There were tire tracks that showed someone had driven to that spot to drop of the cage, with or without the bird in it. Hmmm.
See the sea? This is how far we've walked since we turned inland.
Tomorrow (wifi willing): pictures of Matt's chicken stuffed with haggis. Yum.










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