Friday, May 17, 2013 - Day 5 of The Speyside Walk

Back on track, four of the six of us continued on the walk, picking up where we left off in Aberlour, a couple of miles south of where we spent the night. Tom, Matt, Patty, and Jessica caught the bus to Aberlour. Kathy and I caught a cab to Ballindaloch, with the thought of giving our legs and feet a rest and exploring a real castle, Ballindaloch Castle, close to where we were spending the night.

First off, Kathy and I waited and waited for the taxi. We were going to hitch a ride on the luggage transport vehicle. We knew there was no guarantee when the vehicle would arrive, but by 11:30, we decided we didn't want to wait any longer.

Not that the wait had been uneducational. There were several whisky magazines and books lying about in the inn's waiting room. We educated ourselves on how whisky becomes smoky or peaty, which distilleries are no longer in business (a sadly large number), and what the "experts" rate as the best of all whiskies.

1) The peatiness does not come from the water used to make the whisky. Otherwise, said the magazine writer, whenever you took a shower with water coming from the dark-running peaty river, you would come out smelling like a kipper. (Laughed myself silly when I read that.) This is the real answer: When the malt is roasted it is subjected to the smoke from burning peat.

2) The experts had very different opinions. One picked Ardbeg 12, one of my favorites, as one of his favorites. Lagavullin, Laphroaig, and others I had never heard of, including something called Smokehouse or Smokedout or Smokedog or something like that, were also winners.

Getting back to cooling our heels in Craigellichie: We decided to catch another cab and get to Ballindaloch posthaste. Which we did. The driver was very talkative, but I could only understand every 20th word. That's lucky because Kathy understood the other nineteen. Together we pieced together that the driver only lived a couple of miles away in Aberlour, had a dog he sometimes walked as much as five miles a day (Kathy and I felt like such wimps), and his old family farm was on a hill we passed.

Before we knew it, we were in Ballindaloch at the Delnashaugh Inn (have no idea how to pronounce it!).

The desk clerk/bartender/waiter was a first-class talker. ("My mum says I have the gift of gab," he told us.) Although he was only 23, he had seen much of the world with his cadet training program as a teenager, then with the Merchant Marines. He could parachute and pilot a plane. Hospitality in Ballindaloch seemed so tame. Ah, he said, he was training to be a sommelier and was very excited about it. On his recommendation, we tried a local distillation, Cardhu (car-do), and it was good.

Kathy and I had a delicious lunch, at the end of which our bags finally arrived. It had been worth it to take an earlier cab.

For lunch I had a cullen skink fishcake. Perhaps you remember that cullen skink is a Scottish soup with potatoes, fish, and cream/milk. The chef deconstructed that, took the potatoes and fish and made it into a cake, sautéed it, and plopped it in some creamy sauce with leeks. Wow! Bonus: Kathy shared her light and yummy onion rings with me.

After a mile and a half walk to look at the castle (and a mile and a half back to the inn), we were very hungry. Luckily the rest of the group was waiting for us at the inn. We took over the sitting room of the vacant inn. 

The hike to Ballindaloch went smoothly. The way was flat, the sun was shining. No adventures, just lovely scenery, they said. No eating on mounds of weedy, wet sand either, apparently. No funny stories to share. (Well, what good is that, I ask?)

By dinnertime we were all starved.

Matt had game hotpot: venison, partridge, pheasant, and duck stew. Jessica and I had a hamburger, but not like any burger I've had in the U.S., where the meat is squashed together so tightly. The meat was loosely patted together, but it didn't fall apart when I bit into it. Magic. It was so tasty, with pickled red onion, local cheddar, and the Scottish version of bacon gracing the top. 

Everything we ordered was grown locally, including my beef, Matt's game selection, Kathy and Patty's beef for their Wellingtons, Tom's ribs. The others raved about their dishes as well. Tom ordered a rack of pork ribs, and the chef wanted to know what an American thought of his version of a very American dish! (I thought it was tremendous, Tom said.)

This is turning out to be a gourmet walk, which is quite a good combination as it turns out. You need to walk a punishing 12-15 miles to walk off the calories from the meals! (Especially since, of course, we all had dessert!)

Today's whisky tally: Isle of Jura 16 (good +), Cardhu (a local liquid and very good), and Strathsisla (already had and liked).

While the others were hotfooting it here, Kathy and I were having a lady-like luncheon in the pool room.

My cullen skink fishcake. Yum.

Matthew, the man with many different hats, gives us a lesson in whiskies.

The castle on the hill.

The rock garden put in by the "batchelor" baron. (Amazing what you can do if you don't have kids underfoot.)

Spring is just in the early stages here. That's Kathy on the bench among the just greening rose arbor and the early rhododendrons.

Alpaca. Cute to the nth degree.

Here's a proper picture of the castle, actually a little one as castles go.

Kathy wanted me to take a picture of these tire tracks. There's very little room at the edge on which to walk, so it should give a walker pause to see that some vehicles don't quite stay on their side of the road.

Matt's hotpot dinner. Could he tell the difference in the meats? Well, no, he said. Sometimes he bit into something and said that was probably fowl. That wasn't much of a challenge, because he had a three-in-four chance of being right about that!

My new friend, Andy, the ticket taker at the castle, took this picture of us. We had all just finished dessert and could barely move.

Andy and me. BFsF.

Thursday, May 16, 2013 - Day 4 of The Speyside Walk

Today maybe it should have been called The Speyside Stroll for some of us. Tom and Matt set off for Aberlour (pronounced abay-lour, rhymes with hour) on foot, about a 4(?) mile trek. Patty, Jessica, Kathy and I walked one mile into Dufftown to catch the bus to Aberlour. We were standing by a sign that said "bus stop," but Jessica asked someone passing by where to catch the bus. Up the hill, she said. Sure enough, there were people at THAT bus stop. Small town ways -- you just have to know what to do.

We had taken about two hours to walk to Dufftown from Craigellichie the other day. The bus took us back to Craigellichie in seven minutes. Demoralizing. But we were going on to Aberlour for the day, so we stayed put on the bus. It's about a two-and-half-mile walk from there back to Craigellichie, and that was our plan. Bus to Aberlour, find the guys, all walk to Craigellichie together. We were going to be in Craigellichie for a second night.

Now bear with me, because it becomes a little complicated. The next official stretch of The Speyside Walk goes south from Craigellichie through Aberlour and on to Ballendaloch, about 12 miles in all. But  today we were walking from Aberlour north back to Craigellichie. (We had taken a side trip to Dufftown over the past couple of days and were now striving to be back on track.) BUT we didn't want to walk the same stretch we had already walked from Aberlour (south to north), so the plan is to bus back to Aberlour (north to south) and continue the walk from there, thus officially logging all points on the walk, just not in a forward-proceeding sequence. Got it? No? Doesn't matter. 

Anyhow.

In Aberlour, my group peeked in the windows of houses and looked in the yarn shop at locally grown, spun, and dyed yarn. We found a great food store with all kinds of cheeses, whisky, crackers, whisky, fruitcakes, whisky, and whisky. (We returned to it after lunch and Matt chose a Strathsisla whisky.) We decided our dinner would be what we picked up there, so we would have enough time to attend a play in Craigellichie. We had seen a poster advertising "In Praise of Elephants," a musical, to be performed in the town hall tonight. Seriously, who could resist.

While we were waiting for Matt and Tom to show up, we scoped out the town. We decided to have lunch at a "little old lady" cafe, then head down to the Mash-Tun, a bar renowned for their whisky selection, or so a local had told us yesterday. We would go there for sticky toffee pudding for dessert.

That was the plan.

When we arrived at the cafe, it was packed, and not just with little old ladies. About a half hour wait, the young woman told us. Wander, wander, wander. A half an hour later, the restaurant was still packed. We were smarter this time and just hung around and were seated within a few minutes.

Matt has noticed that there are a lot of young women working in food service in Scotland. They are all nice, chipper, and helpful. But the service is mostly slow, sometimes erratic, and diners have to be patient and expect confusion. Today's lunch was no exception. But the people working there were very nice, and I really liked my curried banana toastie. (That's just the way it sounds, a banana with curry, mashed up and spread on toast.)

We had just gotten our lunch and were predicting that the guys would end up at (the more manly) Mash-Tun for lunch, when in they came. Although they arrived about the time they had been expected, they told us they had gotten lost. Matt wryly observed that the "discrete" trail (an actual kind of trail) signs were so discreet that they were invisible. They finally had to "bushwack" through some gorse (prickly plants ALL over Scotland -- and Oregon). Of little solace were the signs that other hikers had had to do the same.

The sticky toffee pudding at the Mash-Tun was so fine. We had it three ways, with (clotted) cream, custard and ice cream. All good. A fine complement to the dessert was the 16-year-old Aberlour I ordered. It tasted of honey. That's not a bad thing to taste like.

On the walk back to Craigellichie, I spotted a fisherman on the riverbank. I went over to grill him. He was fishing for the salmon that were heading upriver to spawn. Unlike in the Pacific Northwest, there is only one kind of salmon here. If the smoked salmon we've had here so far is any indication, it's a great salmon to have! The fish take about five hours to travel to where we were (15 miles from the sea?) on the high tide.

He had more stringent rules about which fish he would keep than required by his fishing license. He was allowed to keep his second and fourth catches. He added that if one of the keep catches had been a "hen," a brooding fish, he would have thrown her back and taken the loss. It's a rule he learned while fishing in Canada, and he appreciated the ecological sensibility of it. Although he wasn't Scottish, he looked like the very embodiment of a Scottish fly fisherman, and I took his picture. 

The rest of the walk was scenic and uneventful. We were greeted by many, many dogs. The Highlander Hotel had all our same rooms available. We met in the lounge to eat our dinner of cheese, pate, bread squashed in the backpack, fruitcake, crackers, wine, and whisky. Then on to the play.

The play wasn't the local affair I thought it would be. It was a professional touring group that specifically worked plays for presentation in small village town halls. Clever. The people who attended were very excited because professional productions don't come around much. Although people we had talked to hadn't expected much of an audience, the place was packed!

The ticketseller was late because her son had spilled the change in their car and they had to scramble to get it back. She was also the refreshment seller. Hope she was happy with the crowd because she worked very, very hard.

The play was sweet, poignant, funny, and fit perfectly in the town hall. We, the audience, sat around the edges of the play. Some audience members, including Tom and Patty participated in the play by drinking tea or accepting an orange. Because one of the actors actually made biscuits (cookies) during the play, that was the bonus we ate after the play was done.

I certainly received nine pounds worth of entertainment.

A quick stop in the hotel's bar for a taste of Isle of Jura, the number one whisky picked by some kind of experts in some article I read in some magazine in the hotel's lounge. It was okay but not in Aberlour's class, in my humble opinion.

The day is now officially done.

P.S. The breakfast at Fernbank House in Dufftown, Scotland was great. The hostess was funny and great. Her dog (who had to pee for the vet and had the hostess chasing him around for a sample) was great. The rooms were spotless. Plus she did our laundry. Times are tough. We said we'd say how good her establishment was. So now you know. Spread the word. She said: Tell your friends, tell your enemies, I'll take care of them all! 

Great.

Lords and ladies of the manor.

Jessica is NOT moving.

The unusual looking shaggy cow of Scotland

The town square at Aberlour.

Waiting for our table. And waiting.

At the Mash-Tun and its fabulous selection of whiskys.

Just a pretty window at the Mash-Tun.

The barrel-shaped bar.

The typical Scottish fisherman (who's actually English).

Eeeee.

You stick your hand in. No, you stick your hand in.

We finally get to see the Spey again after being off-track for a couple of days.

Awwww.

I see the light.

And in the light is another dog. I lurved his stiff ears.

Even the bridges are fancy-schmancy.

This says it all.