People in Chicago, Ohio, and Maine like to tell you, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” That is usually exaggerated at least a bit, but I think the phrase must have originated in Scotland. We drove around in the highlands a lot today, but we were never more than one hundred miles from where we started. We started out in cloudy and calm, then drove into misting rain, then into rain and wind, then just wind, then mist again, then thick fog, and then into sun and clouds, all within eight hours and one hundred miles. When in Scotland, wear layers.

We started the day heading back to Newtonmore, back to the Highland Folk Museum. Meredith does not like to leave museums unseen, and we were passing right by it. She said she did not want to stay long. After an hour and a half, we had seen the rest of the museum. Yesterday we had seen the 1700s section, so today we toured the 1930s and 1940s section, which included a weaver’s, a tailor’s, a couple of houses, a meeting house/locker room for the Scottish sport shinty (like Irish hurling – a rough version of field hockey), a railway depot, a clock repair shop, a sheep farmer’s hut, and a farm. One of the most interesting exhibits was from the 1940s farm, which was set up for wartime Scotland. It included a table set with one week’s worth of food under rationing – it was not a lot. I had not remembered that rationing continued in Britain until 1954. There were some stories posted of children never seeing a banana until they were seven years old.

We got back on the highway, heading northeast, which kept adding to the furthest north we have ever been. We drove over to Speyside Cooperage, which is a barrel maker in the heart of whiskey-making country. Meredith felt we should do something related to whiskey, but neither of us drinks, so she decided to go to a cooperage instead.

It turns out that if you add swelling music, high-definition video, AND multi-sensory stimulation (like smells and heat lamps), you can make cask-making about as epic as Lord of the Rings. The introductory film was excellent. I did not know that whiskey gets almost all of its flavor and color from the cask in which it is aged. So the cooper insisted they are one of the most important parts of the whiskey-making process.

Speyside mostly repairs barrels; they only make about two hundred new casks each year, as opposed to about ten thousand repaired casks. A whiskey barrel has a lifetime of about sixty years, so it can be used three times or so for whiskey. Fun fact: bourbon can ONLY be made in new barrels, so many whiskey casks come from bourbon makers.

The coopers do most of their work by hand, and they are paid by the barrel. To become a journeyman cooper, you need to spend four years as an apprentice first. To repair a barrel, the cooper takes it apart and replaces any bad slats or iron bands. The cask will then be pressure tested and, if passed, it goes on. The inside charring (charring the inside makes charcoal, which helps remove impurities from the aging whiskey) is removed, and the inside is burned again to make new charcoal. The barrel is then ready for shipping. Oh, and the cooper shop had a calico cat wandering about on the factory floor. Good cooper kitty!

We turned back south, taking the eastern road through the Cairngorms National Park, which is supposed to be a very scenic drive. It was, but it started in the rain and, later, fog, which obscured many of the mountains. The hills were patchwork with green grass and brown heather, and it was a sobering landscape (except for the whiskey drinkers). As we got more and more south, we drove out of the weather and finally got some dramatic landscapes, especially as we approached the town of Ballater.

Ballater is a cute town, and has a pretty river running through it. The main claim to fame for the town is that Balmoral Castle, which is owned by the Queen, is nearby. I can understand why – the area is very beautiful, and Queen Victoria had a railway line built to the town for easy access to the castle. We wandered through the town for about half an hour, and then took the very scenic drive back to Pitlochry.

Pitlochry is home to an excellent theater festival, so Meredith had me swing by it to see what was playing. She picked up two front-row tickets to see Absurd Person Singular, so we stayed and ate a light supper at the theater, then saw the show. It was a dark comedy about three married couples each hosting Christmas Eve parties on three successive years. Underlying the plot was the drive for each couple to impress “the right people” at the party. It was very funny in many parts, and uncomfortable in others (the men of the play are pretty ghastly). It was a good play, and we had a great time talking to the retired Scottish couple from Glasgow who were sitting next to us. The husband was an avid cyclist who biked about seven hundred miles in a week last year on the continent, and he was a retired physicist who worked in medical imaging. The wife was a semi-retired ballet teacher and an avid theatergoer. They were interesting people to talk to.

Meredith milked all the time out of “her” last day before I take over tomorrow – we got back to the room at almost 11:00 pm after a full day of touring. I expect some of “my” days will involve sleeping in.