St. Andrews - June 20, 2003

We were greeted by nice weather Friday morning and on the way back to the main road, stopped by "Queen's View".  This is documented as being a favorite spot of Queen Victoria, but there are arguments that it was actually established for an earlier Queen. To the right you see Loch Tay in all it's glory.

Our second stop was the Edrudan Distillery, the smallest distillery in Scotland.  Their still only exceeds minimum legal size by the smallest margins.  It's very popular with the tours as it is one of the few that still don't charge a viewing fee.  (Seems that the Scots got in the habit of taking a Sunday tour through the nearest distillery in order to get a free dram and the owners didn't like that much.)

As you can see, their stills are not very big.  The first one distills the brew up to 20% alcohol, the second one takes it to final density (about 55%).  It sounds to me like the magic in the flavor is not as much how you brew it (although that does alter things), but more the choice of used sherry kegs that you let it age in.  That's why a 12 year old scotch is much darker and smoother than a 10 year old.

We had some free time after the tour (I think to allow us more time in the shop to see if we'd buy some) so I took a walk over the hills.  I was impressed how much this looks like portions of upstate New York with the rolling hills and farms.

We got to St. Andrews just about lunch time.  They dropped us off right by the old golf course (the new course was built in 1890, but they still use those terms to refer to them).  If you want to play on the old course, you have to put your name into a lottery and at 6PM every night they draw names to see who will get to play (if you're a local, you can bypass the lottery however).

During the reformation, John Locke got pretty passionate in his sermons about the evils of the catholic church.  People in St. Andrews took that very literally and destroyed this cathedral (again, this is the new one, built in the 1500s, the one behind it dates back to 1290).  Once they destroyed it, they proceeded to cart the stones off to build their homes and other buildings.  It's still a neat place to visit, but all you can see are ruins (and gravestones).

St Andrew's Castle is not in much better shape.  We didn't go in this one (we were all pretty "castled out").  Our pass would have admitted us (it was the last day of our 3 days), but nobody really cared.

Crossing the Firth of Forth into Edinburgh is a pair of very interesting bridges.  The one to the left is the railway bridge build just after another bridge had just been blown down.  The architects were told to make sure this one didn't, and it looks like nothing would damage it.

The matching road bridge is obviously much newer and shows the nice clean lines of most suspension bridges.

This concluded the escorted portion of our tour.  If you signed up for the 7 day tour (we did), they include a night stay in an Edinburgh hotel in the price and a pass on the city bus tour, but it's not escorted.  So our bus took us downtown, helped us get checked in, then left us on our own.  This was fine with us, but I got the impression that some of the other people were less happy.