Blog Archives

I’ve updated the Picture Albums and added the pictures from our recent trip down to Florida to visit family (Tony’s dad and Janet, my mom & Watson, Lisa, Steve, and the kids, and Tony’s Aunt Kay). Also saw Pam since she was down visiting as well. It was good to see everyone. Tiring, but good.

We’re back now, from Scotland. It was a really, really lovely trip. I’m so glad we went. We met some of the best, mostly lovely (there’s that word again…it’s a UK thing, I think, right up there with “wee”) people I’ve ever met. It was a really welcome respite from “real” life.

If I use the word “really” again, just smack me.

The first part of the trip was to Bladnoch, located in the Lowlands area (Galloway), near Wigtown. Not that anyone’s ever heard of even Wigtown (the book capital of Scotland), but seriously NO ONE has heard of Bladnoch. One of the other guys in the Distillery School with us actually got in an argument with a cab driver in Glasgow who insisted that there was no such place!

So, yes, we were there for Whisky School. We learned how to make Scotch whisky (note the absence of the extra “e” we Americans put in). We also drank a fair bit of it. Raymond & Florence own the distillery and they are truly awesome people. I think Raymond has a story for everything and Florence is his long-suffering (but not really suffering) wife. John, the StillMan, is just a great big teddy bear of a guy. He and Hugh, his assistant & the official “angel” of the distillery (i.e. the angel’s share is supposed to be the whisky that evaporates while in the barrel) are probably my favorite new friends. Also at the distillery are Sue and Kevin, two more just lovely people with a funny little pooch named Mabel. And Yolanda, though I didn’t get to talk to her much.

This was the first “Wild Scotsman” sponsored whisky school. I’m not sure how they were structured before. The Wild Scotsman is Jeoff, who should wear his hair down more often. And his mentor, one of the wily greats in Scottish whisky history, John McDougall.

Then there were the other attendees: Michael, probably the singularly most whisky-obsessed person I’ve ever met in my entire life; Eric, the quiet one with a good sense of humor; Jay, the rock-n-roll guy of the session (I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a more unlikely lawyer); Iain, the youngest and most hip of all of us (he’s in a cool band called the Skarsoles) and the son of the bottler; Drew, Jeoff’s cousin and the owner of a pub in Pittsburgh; and Lee & his wife & sister, a soft-spoken Southern gentleman from the same town Tony was born in.

All the other people we met too — local rugby players, local farmers (Gordon, for one, a really nice fellow), the B&B owners (Mr. & Mrs. Key – she being the one singularly responsible for me gaining 5 pounds, I think), the pub owners (Sinead, Derek, and young Derek)…small town Scotland is a nice place to visit.

All of the pics are up at http://www.yabookscentral.com/pictures/Scotland I took 724 of ‘em, though a few are videos I haven’t figured out how to post yet.

We also spent some time in Glasgow (kind of industrial, but with some hidden gems if you walk around) and Edinburgh (very old, lots of history, and lots of hills). A friend of Tony’s from work took us out one night (Julie and her husband Fraser). They were also just lovely people.

One other interesting note…I’ve studied quite a bit of faerie history/fable and I’d heard of Aiken Drum, but had not realized that his story originated in Bladnoch! Very, very cool. Raymond even had the whole Aiken Drum poem up (I’ve only seen bits of it before in my reference book by Katherine Briggs).

Oh…and the Viking Cat Farms thing…one of the guidebooks in the B&B in Bladnoch mentioned another local town — Whithorn — and said that it was worth a visit because of the archaeological evidence of VIKING CAT FARMS.

That has to be singularly the strangest thing I have ever heard of.

But true…I just looked it up and the Whithorn site (everything has a website these days) says: “Whithorn also came under Viking influence and from this period, archaeological evidence suggests that cats were farmed for their skins and finely decorated antler combs were manufactured.”

The time change is totally kicking my butt. I don’t know how Tony does it. It barely seems to phase him at all. In fact, I dropped him off at the airport this morning for Chicago (and then he leaves from there tonight to go on to Toronto). The man is like the Energizer Bunny or something.

Spain was great, all around. Some things surprised me…

• Everyone smokes there. It’s hard to get away from. Much more than in Italy (at least from what I remember). And our brief stopover in Frankfort at the airport…the whole airport reeked of smoke. It was awful. And I thought Kentucky was bad.
• Very few people spoke any English and even those that did, really didn’t want to use it. It’s like what you hear about the French.
• I’d always heard about Castillian Spanish (you know, the lisping), but there are actually a total of 6 different main dialects in Spain. The Basque is really, really hard. They have all these K’s and X’s…it looks a lot like Greek and sounds like a mush of French, Portuguese, and Spanish altogether. Madrid was easiest — it’s Castillian there, but at least it is closer to what I learned way back when in school.
• Graffitti was absolutely everywhere, especially in the larger cities. It’s really terrible. Beautiful, incredible and very historic buildings even have graffitti. I’ll never understand that because it isn’t strangers coming in…it’s people doing it to their own town. That was the most depressing thing. More graffitti than I’ve seen anywhere else, including places like New York and Miami.
• No one drinks sherry (jerez). All those travel channel things about how everyone drinks sherry with their tapas? Not even close. Yeah, everyone eats tapas, but they pretty much are drinking either cerveza, vino, or sangria. The one place we were actually able to get sherry (once I got the guy to understand what I was asking), he actually had to leave the bar and get it from another area. And it wasn’t just regional — same thing in all the places we visited. The Food Network lies.
• Flamenco still rocks, but the Spanish don’t go to see it much anymore. We went to one of the older places (Torres Bermejas), and only tourists were there. I read in an interview later (here at home, and with two of the people we actually saw – Toni el Pelao & Uchi) how the dancers are lamenting the fact that the Spaniards just don’t go anymore. Such a shame. Such a beautiful thing — both the bailaors (dancers) and the cantaors (singers), not to mention the guitar playing guys. Tony was just in love with it. He could hardly contain himself from clapping.
• Spain is expensive (es muy caro!), even in the smaller cities. Not sure we could afford to live there.
• We still love the markets (mercados). Probably the reason we will one day have to live in Europe. Well, that and the food.

I posted all the pictures via the other blog ( http://go2louisville.blogspot.com ) and if I weren’t so tired, I’d link them from here too. Maybe tomorrow…

Counting down until Thursday, when we’re off to Spain. This will be our first really real vacation since we moved–no work involved, though Tony is taking his laptop with him. I don’t think I could talk him into leaving it if I tried.

I am leaving mine behind though. I need a break. Shoot, my elbow needs a break.

Tomorrow I’m going to stockpile a few more reviews and mail a shipment of prize books and then I’m gonna shut the sucker down.

Well, probably not. I’m sure I’ll be checking e-mail until the last minute. But I can dream.

I’ve been doing some of the Spanish CD’s — I got through 3 of them today. It’s helping me to remember some things, which is good. At least I can remember a lot of the vocabulario — I just can’t put it all together very easily. And now I’ve got Italian fighting it out with the Spanish in my head. What comes out is often not even Spanglish…more like Spanalianish. I’ll probably wind up resorting to pointing and hand gestures, but I’ll try. Hopefully that will count for something. And at least I can still read it fairly well!