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Published: July 15th 2009
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Time to catch up. Time to finish this blog. Better late than never.
The trip is over and we're finally home. What are my impressions and what are my favorite memories?
Taking the train from Paris to Calais, seeing that many places remain as they have always been, somewhat quaint and worth a second look, if the opportunity ever arises to come this way again.
It is an experience worth doing, no matter what the weather ( except for fog, of course), because you can see chalk cliffs as you are departing and again when you approach the English coast. Neither Calais, nor Dover have shed their traditional look for the new age. The great chalk cliffs of Dover still hold guard over the sea, as does a fortress above the town.
After seeing London in what everyone seems to think was a heat wave, it was even more pleasant to discover sunshine in Scotland. Despite the chance of showers and cooler weather, we had a very pleasant few days in Glasgow. we took the opportunity to tour the highlands with a company called Rabbie's. Our guide was a pleasant young man with a heavy accent by
Peter Pan statue
In London, the kids are just drawn to it and climb all over it the name of Colin. With him doing the driving and carefully explaining things along the way, we enjoyed a look at Loch Ness, Stirling Castle, Loch Lomond, a single malt distillery and revisited Hamish, the Highland cow.
The distillery was Glengoyne, a maker of fine malt whiskey. Now, the privately owned distilleries left in Scotland all have to be associated with a particular water source. In the case of Glengoyne, a small waterfall behind the distillery was the original source. We started our tour of the distillery with a sample of their 10 year old whiskey. I found it quite good.
But, as we went along the tour from the barley malt house to the facility housing the stills, it was obvious that the demands of modern production meant that may mean in the whiskey after the waterfall was a fiction. The barley was not grown locally, nor malted locally. The actual water used in making the whiskey was procured locally, but without identification. It is my guess that the only thing that makes one whiskey distinctive from another is the recipe that each distillery has and some of the materials that are used in storing the whiskey,
such as the sherry barrels from Spain that impart color and taste as the whiskey ages.
Just as Jack Daniels touts the purity of their water, so many Scotch distilleries also claim purity for their water sources, but those located, as was Glengoyne, by some small brook or ancient and limited water supply, obviously require water from greater sources, by their own admission. I'll say simply this, their basic whiskey is very good. We got to sample a 17-year-old whiskey, and I'll have to say that in my opinion it did not benefit from its stay in the barrel.
That has to make you wonder about these 20 year old scotches, or other batches aged in the barrel for several years. Perhaps they gain a taste as distinctive as those scotches made with malt barley, heated by peat. I can drink the stuff, even enjoy it but, to tell the truth, I suspect that any single malt aged from 3 to 10 years in the barrel is about as great a pleasure as anyone can expect, once it passes the lips.
It is not my imagination, because I once lived in Japan, which has a similar climate,
that many flowering plants in Scotland and England bloom a little bit more fully and vibrantly because of the shorter season, and the greater amount of rain. When the sun is out, it does seem like a garden. This raises one's expectations, but I suspect you would have to travel to Britain many times in a lifetime in order to experience such a visual splendor very often. We were just lucky this time.
One of the great pleasures of travel are the people you meet along the way. We met Scots, Brits, Irish, French, Germans, Swiss, Chinese, Japanese, Spaniards, Brazilians, Puerto Ricans, Portuguese and many Canadians, as well as a few Americans, while on this trip. Sometimes, you do not have to travel to a country in order to learn something about it. People have a way of carrying their culture with them, I guess we are no exception in that.
Crime reared its ugly head from time to time. This time we saw less scanning and more outright robbery, probably because of the economic climate. A Japanese lady sitting at an outdoor table by a restaurant in Barcelona was yanked out of her chair, thrown to the
ground, as a sneak thief snatched her purse and ran. A Chinese girl, who was staying at the same Rome hotel as we were, withdrew money from an ATM in the train station, put the money in a pocket of her back pack, merely zippered shut, and arrived at the hotel without her cash. A Spanish lady had a similar experience in Glasgow, of all places.
It's popular to attribute that sort of petty crime to Naples, Rome, Barcelona, Paris or even London, but it's apparent that tourists are a target of opportunity wherever they go. We, however, with our passports, money and credit cards, tucked safely away in hidden pockets and connected by chains or straps did not suffer any losses this time. I wish I could say the same about my light weight titanium prescription glasses, which disappeared from the lobby of our Rome hotel, after I had been using my laptop there for wireless access. I apparently forgot them and when I came back to look for them, they were gone.
I will not say they were stolen, necessarily, because they were both lightweight and had thin dark frames, so they could have been easily
swept into a trash can by mistake. Who knows?
Scotland resonates with me. Somewhere deep in my RNA must be a racial memory that finds Ireland and Scotland very, very familiar. Despite my love for Barcelona, Southern France and Paris, I feel very at home in old Scotland. I even look like a Scot, and probably more so when the kilt I ordered arrives.
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