SCT Day 10 — Sleat, Torabhaig, and an Otter!

Well, it is a good thing we didn’t have to drive to Glasgow today, because south of us got 7 inches of rain overnight. Yeah…that is a lot, even for Scotland. Anyway, it still rained plenty near us, so we used today to go finally tour a distillery. On our way out onto Skye, we were stopped by the cops. They could tell we were Americans from a quarter mile away, and wanted to make sure we would drive safely. They gave us a nice little instructional pamphlet on the roads. Thanks, but a little late for that, bud. Also, been practicing on FORZA HORIZON 4.

After getting on Skye, we went to the Distillery at Torabhaig. This is a relatively new distillery, but this meant it wasn’t super popular, and we were able to get a relatively cheap tour+tasting. The tour was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about single malt whisky that I can’t wait to tell my friend Greg about. I was taking notes during the tour, and the tour guide thought I was doing a bit for the Washington Post. That would be cool, but no.

Here’s the only photo I took:

Yes, please make Whisky from that water.

Some things I learned were that the process before distilling is almost identical to that of making beer. In fact, whisky makers in the past would drink the beer-ish part while they worked, and would always be drunk. That’s…probably good we don’t do that anymore. The other fun thing I learned is that the US&A doesn’t let people age multiple whiskys in a single barrel, so we break up our barrels and sent them to Scotland and other countries since they killed all of their trees in like the 1200s. They can age whatever they want in whatever they want, basically. The other fun thing I learned, as I’ve probably already mentioned, is that much of the Higlands and Hebrides were controlled by Norway for centuries, so many areas actually have Old Norse names. That’s fun!

I could go on and on for another two paragraphs, but let’s cut it here and just say that the tour and tutored tasting were both super neat! The distillery was in a region known as the “Sleat Peninsula”, which is an a giant peninsula on the southeast of Skye. After the tour, we drove a bit farther down the peninsula and checked out a ferry terminal. As I probably already mentioned, there are ferries everywhere that take people all around the various islands and peninsulas. Another win for socialism. We got some fish and chips here. For me, this was the best fish and chips we had all trips.

Some photos:

Now, as you might know from having read thus far, we really want to see some otters! Well, guess what, at the end of a winding narrow road was a place called “Otter Haven”, so of course we went there! We went on a nice hike out to this wildlife blind, and sat there for 15 minutes. I was just zooming in and our with my 50x optical zoom camcorder. Finally, I saw something swimming in the water. I followed this something for a while, and it turned out to be an otter!!!! We were SO EXCITED!

Here’s the video of that:

And the Garmin:

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12214027658

And some photos:

Sit in there to find otters.

GREAT Success on our last day in Duirinish!!!