Day 12-Oban and the Estate

The weather as we awoke this morning was like a dream come true. The sky was clear and blue and there was a cool light breeze blowing in off the ocean. The air here seems to have the dual ability to invigorate you and to make you relaxed all the time. Cindy appears to be completely over her cold now and is feeling like her usual self. Everyone else was up before me this morning and when I got up I worked on choosing and preparing the photos for the Dunstaffnage Castle entry I would post later in the day to the blog while eating some peanut butter and jelly on toast.

Our time here in Scotland is winding down and we have done and seen everything we had hoped to when we planned this trip. The next few days we will be staying closer to Oban and the cottage most of the time and getting ready for the next leg; being in London from Saturday through Tuesday.

We left the cottage at 9:10am to go into Oban so we could be on time for our 9:45am reservation for the Oban Distillery tour. Cindy's dad had not planned on going when we made our reservation for a party of 3, but they were kind enough to allow us to add him on when he decided he would like to go as well. The mechanics of the distilling process are pretty standard, the only changes being subtle differences between each individual distillery which become their "trademark" of recognition. So, much of what we saw was the same as we had seen at Tobermory in that aspect. But, those subtle differences added up to a huge difference in the product. I mentioned before that I have never been much of a Scotch drinker, but that I found the Tobermory to be very good, in fact much better than the "top shelf" Scotch I had tried in America. The Scotch put out by the Oban Distillery was many levels higher above the Tobermory. Smoother and more robust and yet easy going down. Adding a splash of water released an entirely different set of impressions and flavor. After tasting their 14 year Scotch, Cindy and I knew we were getting one for ourselves and one for Jason and letting him give the Tobermory 10 year to someone else, lol.

After the tour I went down to the Internet cafe to post the entry for what we had done on Tuesday. Fortunately, I was able to upload all the photos from the Edinburgh visit and the entry and photos for Tuesday without any difficulty. If you haven't already, I hope you'll look at the Edinburgh photos now that they are posted.

I met back up with Cindy and her parents who had been exchanging dollars for pounds (1.99 exchange rate...ouch!) and we walked down through the town to a couple of destinations. We passed a Rolls Royce parked on the side of the street and snapped a picture of Cindy's dad standing next to it so he can claim it is his car or that it was our rental car. I stopped at a newsagent and picked up a couple of newspapers and then took the opportunity to release another book in a phone booth here in Oban. I have one more book to release somewhere in London before the trip is over. Then we walked down to the Tourist Information Center to check on a few things and to pick up a particular wall-hanging for Heather that we have not seen anywhere else. I also have to mention here how great the staff is at the TIC in Oban, particularly a former member of the Royal Marines named Neil. He gave us careful and excellent directions to Edinburgh the other day that made our drive so much easier than it would have been. They have also asked us to please send them a postcard from Florida so they can put it up on their board of visitors because they have none from Florida. Can you believe that no one from Florida has been to Oban before us? More likely no one has bothered to send a postcard back, but we have the address and will send one back upon our return.

The four of us also wrote a letter to the people of Oban via a letter to the editor at The Oban Times newspaper expressing our delight with our stay. The weekly paper publishes every Thursday, so we'll see tomorrow if they included our letter in this week's edition.

From the TIC we went to the grocery store for a few food items then returned to the cottage for lunch. The owner's son, Charlie, who arranged our booking here at the cottage and greeted us when we first arrived 11 days ago, was here mowing the grass around the estate because his mother, who lives in the castle, was going to be returning the next day. We spent a few minutes talking with him and learning some more of the wonderful history of this place, but I'll save that for another time. He brought 4 of his 8 dogs with him and we all had fun playing with them as a sort of therapy for missing our own dogs who are back home. After lunch we all took a nap and then awoke around 5pm planning to walk up part of the mountain on our southwestern side. However Charlie was still mowing (it's a huge piece of land) and he asked if we had walked around the "fenced garden" yet. We had not because we thought it was near his home up the hill, but it turned out his home was much farther away and what we thought was his home was actually a barn and storage building. That's how big it was! So we instead walked up to the fenced garden (as is the case with a lot of fencing here in Scotland, the garden was enclosed in a hand laid stone fence) and explored around that area for about an hour and a half before returning to the cottage for dinner.

I hope you can tell that we are enjoying ourselves immensely on this vacation. After dinner, Cindy and I were sitting out on the bench facing the inlet and watching the sun set (9pm) discussing how we were going to dread returning to work. But we have made some wonderful memories that will soften that return, and those we'll keep with us the rest of our lives.

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