Day 16 - Tuesday 14 March - Dufftown

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This weather is just crazy. We were laying in bed planning our day after having our brekkie (lovely habit we’re in) exclaiming over the giant yellow thing in the sky shining radiance upon everything in the land … and then it was snowing. Then it was sunny …. Then it was snowing. We thought we’d venture out nice and early on Wednesday’s itinerary and drove as far as the turnoff to Keith, but the Yaris wasn’t so keen. It wanted to slide around on the snow, so we turned around to return and promptly passed the snow plough on his way to plough the road to Keith and throw salt on it. But return to our cottage we did, where we just relaxed until it was almost lunchtime, then set out again.

We drove down the snowy roads to Glenfiddich to go to their magnificent coffee shop (https://www.glenfiddich.com/assets/Uploads/Shared/Distillery/Lunch-Menu.pdf ) only to find that they do not update their internet and the coffee shop is not open, just the gift shop. So we chatted to the gift shop girl and one of her colleagues came in who recommended a cafe in Dufftown run by his friend. So we went there for a lunch of bacon and cheese paninis - not quite what we were hoping for, but very friendly service. Nothing Scottish about it. Now my regard for Glenfiddich is even lower. We also wandered down to the Whisky Shoppe and found a shop with with a reasonable stock of whiskies but nothing to impress us - great for the US tourists I guess.

We continued on our way - we saw the Strathisla Distillery where Chivas Regal is blended. HUGE estate. So many huge storage sheds. We continued on to Craigellachie via Macallan then back up to Buckie, through Cullen and back to our cottage.

After our disappointing lunch we decided to go to the Cullen Bay Hotel for dinner - this is the hotel that claims to have invented Cullen Skink. We got there early (in case they weren’t doing dinners) and it was open. We were the only people there, but they had reservations for later in the evening (it was only 5pm at this stage) - as the lady said, we could look at the view, later in the evening all you can see is the reflections of yourselves on the glass! The Cullen Skink was nice and my fish pie (haddock) and Tom’s beef were lovely. Then we called it a day and went home!

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