Whisky Tastings and Furniture

John and I took a trip to one of the islands - Isle of Islay (pronounced eye-la). There is only one thing to do on this island - whisky! Oh and wool - but that's a separate story. There are ~3,200 people that live on this small island about 2 hours off of the mainland by ferry. If they are farmers, they are farming barley and peat moss and if not, then they work in the distilleries. There are 8 - and soon to be 10 - distilleries on the island. The ones that we visited were Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Caol Ila (which has become John's favorite since we arrived).

Bowmore Whisky Distillery

John in front of the Caol Ila Distillery

John and Alix on the dock in front of Caol Ila -

Don't you love John's new hat?

John looking cool in front of Caol Ila

Whisky and Chocolate tasting

A church in Bowmore -

built in a circle so that demons

would have no place to hide

A view of a distillery from the beach

Our tasting box at Lagavulin

Whisky and Chocolate Tasting up close

Without really planning ahead, we had to take what we could get in terms of tours at the distilleries, which worked out really well. We showed up at Lagavulin and signed up for a Whisky tasting. Normally there would be 20 people in this, but on this day, it was just John and I. We tried 5 of their whiskies paired with raw ingredients (i.e. barley, peat moss, vanilla sugar) to either eat or smell to draw out the flavors. We learned A LOT about whisky at this - really cool experience. At Laphroaig, we could only have a taste - but that's never a bad thing. And we had a short time at Caol Ila as we had to catch the ferry back, but I am still glad we got to see John's favorite whisky distillery.

When we got to the Isle of Islay, however, we had quite the adventure. Driving up the road, we figured out that we would have no cell service on this island which basically rendered Google maps completely useless - other than just being able to see our current location. We were trying to drive down to one side of the island, when I realized we were going the wrong direction. When John went to turn around, we ended up going down a small road where there was a house indicating itself as the Woolen Mill. In the states, if we had come across something like this, it would have been a back road hill-billy ready to shoot us unless we got off the property, but this is Scotland, where it's more likely to be a little old lady waiting to serve us tea. We almost left, but instead decided to go inside. We were greeted by a man working the shop and the first thing he asked was if we wanted a tour - which again, in the states would mean he is going to take us in the back and chop us into the little pieces... but this is Scotland, so we got to see how the wool tweed is made:

Wool machine - creating the threads that will go through the loom

The owner of the shop was very nice to us and told us lots of jokes and stories. He even told us that the Queen came into his shop one time - his response to her: "Hello, Your Majesty, do you have an appointment?" As it turned out, this shop and mill is very well known, making all of the tweed for the island and distilleries and even for the movie Braveheart. We had no idea what gem we had stumbled upon.

Stonefield Castle

John sitting regally in a chair in Stonefield Castle

A pool table - a very large pool

table (notice the scale with the

cue on the table)

On the way to the island, we stayed at Stonefield Castle - unfortunately, we arrived at night and left early in the morning, so it was too dark to take a picture. Great stay though - including the bottle of wine waiting for us in the room.

A photo from our hotel in Islay of a ruined house

We have also gotten in the habit of walking up to the North Sea along the river in front of our place. It's not too far, but it's really pretty. There is also a contingency of swans - very large swans - that live in the river.