Whiskey and Nessie

Two of the biggest tourist attractions in Scotland are whiskey and the Loch Ness monster. It may not sound like fun to you, but we are talking about Scotland here -- there isn't exactly a ton of big city excitement to be had. If you wanted Cirque du Soliel or Broadway then you should go to where those shows are offered.

But if you want slightly off-beat local experiences unique to Scotland, whiskey and Loch Ness would definitely fit your bill. (Please note that there is also sheep shearing as well as driving for hours on long windy, one-lane roads to go look at very old castle remnants. Hey, don't knock it until you try it!)

Take the Dalwhinney Whiskey Production Tour for example. Let me start by saying that I have never acquired a taste for whiskey. Not even a little bit. But Scotland is the birthplace of whiskey and the Scots have had the good monetary sense to bilk it for every tourist pound they could. Therefore, there are several distilleries and distillery tours around the country. Macallum, Oben, Glenfiddich to name a few. These distilleries are all located in the middle of nowhere (except for the Crown Royal which seems to be more like the Disneyland destination of the small town in which it is located).

Dalwhinney is situated in the Scottish highlands in a valley between some pretty big mountains. There is nothing close by for miles as far as I could tell. So, if you go on the tour, drink too much and are abandoned by whomever you arrived with -- too bad for you. You can't call a cab to come take you home and you will probably have to hitch hike for days before you get a lift.

As soon as you arrive in the parking lot of the distillery and get out of your car, you can smell whiskey everywhere in the air. If I liked whiskey I probably could have just hung around the parking lot all day sniffing the air, but I don't so we went on the tour which was actually quite interesting even for an abstainer like me. And since I don't like whiskey I gave my son my end-of-the-tour whiskey sample. When it comes to whiskey drinking there don't seem to be any government-imposed age limits.

Now, on a different note, the next day we headed off to Loch Ness in search of its monster. I must say that the Loch Ness people have created a very impressive museum and presentation -- particularly since it is a one-horse show so to speak and not the world's most broadly focused subject matter.

That said, I loved the museum.

I am not going to spill the beans on whether or not Nessie exists but I have to say that the museum's presentation left anyone willing to consider the evidence with something interesting to think about.

And in case that's not enough fun for you, we spent a few hours driving around looking for a 3500 year old stone circle that ended up being in the middle of a sheep-grazing field and so small that it didn't even have a real signpost leading to it! (We found it anyway -- although my kids thought that I was really nuts when we finally realized it must have been a stone circle for midgets.) And, in the meantime, we stumbled across Europe's oldest tree -- a 5000 year old Yew tree located across the road from the the mini stone circle.

I am sure that both of these finds will have their own museums soon enough.