However ...
I pulled back the curtains this morning and it was misty and looked like it had rained not too long ago. Yikes!
This is what our host, Martin, had to say: If you can see the mountains, the rain is on the way. If you can't see the mountains ... it's already raining. (Sounds like something we'd say in Oregon, yeah.)
On with the long underwear, the layers, the hat, and gloves. Put the rainpants in the backpack, just in case.
To get to the punchline, it was overcast all day long but it never rained. As a matter of fact, at about the halfway point, it was downright muggy, so I packed up my jacket and hat and gloves. I was stuck with the long underwear, however!
A lot of the walk reminded me of central Oregon: timber, dry bushes, occasional deer. The Scottish deer are tiny. In fact, we had trouble earlier figuring out if it was a big bunny or a small deer. It was an fairly easy, flat walk, with only a couple of outstanding scenic points. It was all very pleasant and before we knew it (although my feet knew it), we were in Boat-of-Garten.
Why is it called Boat-of-Garten? Who knows. I'm here for the walk, so you'll have to Google it if you want to know. (Then let me know. :) )
Malt whiskey talley: Benrolach -- very pleasant without a strong aftertaste, good or bad.
Inverarity -- a Speyside whisky, clever play on words, very good, very pleasant, hard to get in England, impossible to get in U.S. As our current host says, there are lots of good whiskies, you don't need to pine after one you can't get. So right!
BTW, we learned from Martin this morning that 90% of Cardhu, a Speyside whisky that we had tried a stop or two ago, goes into Johnnie Walker whisky!
Patty and Kathy caught the bus from Grantown to Boat, so they had some extra time to explore Grantown. They walked down to the river and the Grant cemetery, the same walk Matt, Tom, and I had taken the day before. (I thought my camera was broken so there are no pictures of that walk. It turned out the camera wasn't broken.) The cemetery is home to generations of Grants, the founding family of Grantown, naturally.
After we had been walking for about an hour along the Spey, I looked across the river. There was a graveyard across the way. Hmm, I thought, that looks just like the one we went to yesterday. And that bench, that looks just like the bench near the graveyard we saw yesterday. Wait a minute! That IS the same graveyard. We had taken an hour to circle around and get across the river to a spot that is a 10-minute walk from our B&B! No fair!
As we walked along, Jessica, whose shoes have not done right by her, collected stray clumps of wool to shove in her shoes to cushion her toes. Patty also knew this secret. She said ballerinas often pad their shoes to cushion the impact on their toes.
Jessica was very excited about the bird-watching possibilities. As we entered the forest outside of Grantown, we heard an unusual birdcall, kind of a chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck. The day before, Matt had been hoping against hope that he'd hear the call of the capercaillie grouse, which ends in a kind of clop-clop sound, so the wisdom goes. We decided the chuck-chuck was close enough to a clop-clop and called it signed, sealed, and delivered that we'd heard the elusive capercaillie.
While walking 11 miles, there's a lot of time for reflection. I was mostly a blank slate or meditating on right, left, right, left, etc. But for the few minutes I tried to come up with some deep thoughts, I did think about how wonderful it is to see a different country at such a slow pace. I marveled at how people could farm such inhospitable land with such a short growing season -- especially this year. I pondered the extraordinary out-of-the-box thinking of Darwin as I saw before me evidence of how something could be familiar yet totally different.
As we approached Boat-of-Garten and our, as it turns out, very upscale B&B with its own house malt whisky, I thought how amazing that I could go from walking through an ecosystem that really didn't need me to the overstuffed, very comfortable chair in the B&B's sitting room with a glass of very fine whisky.
Here are some of the different ways we got to Boat-of-Garten.
The River Spey as seen from the footbridge above.
An hour later, that danged cemetery, about 10-15 minutes walk from our B&B!
Heather?
No one would dare run over someone with a bright green backpack!
Why should we get up? There's nothing to do.
This chimney seems to be missing something.
Our lunch, made up of rejects and leftovers from other days. And candy. Always candy.
This town had nothing really to recommend it, except for a great bathroom and a picnic table by a little stream. Heaven. It was a little past the halfway point.
Some of the trails were really, really narrow.
Wow! Heather on the hills.
Almost squashed the little feller.
A dark, still pond, with dead trees, hostile horsetail reeds poking out, no sounds, not even birds. All of a sudden ... Okay, maybe I've been reading too many mystery books. Ya think?
The view from our new B&B in Boat-of-Garten.
