Wednesday May 23rd - North of Inverness

The furthest north we'll go on this trip.  Before the day is out we'll be 60 miles from the end of the mainland UK, the town of John O'Groats.  And just beyond that are the Shetland Islands, where Shetland Sheepdogs are originally from.  Maxine and I have had two of them, Shelties.  First Ally, and then, until last year, Cassie.  And coming this close to the Shetland Islands, and with all the sheep around, I literally expected to see packs of Shelties working the fields to herd the animals.  But, not a single one!  Not a sheltie anywhere.  We're puzzled.

We start the day with the "full Scottish breakfast", knowing it would carry us through the day, past lunch, and into the early evening.

We head north in our car.  Conscious that as tourists we're driving slower than residents, at one point I pull off the road.  But, I don't signal far enough in advance and there's noise behind me.  To make a long story short, I'd startled the older couple driving just behind me and the guy with the truck bumped their bumper.  No damage at all to anyone's car.  No one hurt.  Not a problem, but it could have been quite a hiccup for the day and for the trip.

We stop in the town of Dornlach, which had been recommended by the friends whose son was at St. Andrews.  And I can picture them spending a couple days there.  A charming little town and a nice stop before we get to Dunrobin.

Which would be Bill Gates' version of a lottery fantasy of a place to buy.  Seriously.  The seat of the clan Sutherland, it was still owned by the family.  The tour only lets you see a small, very small, part of the overall castle.  After touring, we head out to the gardens.  We're a bit pressed for time (whisky tasting planned for the afternoon) so we don't stay for the falconry demonstration.  We do ask a Scottish couple to take some pictures of us with the castle in the background, hoping for another holiday card option.  We'd picked them to ask when we saw that they both had very expensive cameras around their necks.  We decided we'd done OK when he dropped to his knee on the grass to better frame the picture with us in the background.

And now for the whisky tastings.  First to Clynehish where we try 3 different ones.  Then to Glenmorangie where we have 4 including ones aged in Port and Sauterne casks (the later was Maxine's overall favorite of all the tastings anywhere).  Then to Glen Ord for one last tasting.

Then, back south to our hotel, Culloden, where we have another tasting and some peanuts at an outdoor table on the lawn (again, GREAT weather!).  Then dinner at the hotel's restaurant.

My possibly incomplete list of whisky's we tasted at the hotel are: Tomatin (which is the one we'd passed on the ride up and the nearest to the hotel), Bruichladdich, Kilchoman (the newest from Islay!), Dalwhinney, and Tobermary from Isle of Mull.