To Fort William day 51 Tue 12 Jun 2018

Raining at 6.30am, light drizzle at 8.45. Early departure about 9.30am from Invernente bed and breakfast Callander Stirling Scotland. After a while passed by a police car with lights and siren on, then about 10am joined a traffic queue. More police cars and an ambulance with lights and sirens as well as a small plane and helicopter. At about 10.30am a man in a kilt was walking back from the incident and advised there would be a two hour wait before the road would reopen. So we detoured halfway across Scotland in order to reach Fort William. (The New Zealand road closure again). Yvonne did a magnificent job of finding a route by map alone as the GPS was just telling us to turn around for fifty miles. Abandoned my plan to visit Glen Coe and instead visited the Highland Chocolatier. Savoury muffin and chocolate cake with hot chocolate for lunch. (Sugar overload...). The on to Dewar’s Aberfeldy for a whiskey distillery tour. Learnt that barley with a small amount of yeast is fermented to produce a basic beer which is then distilled to produce whiskey. Temperature is used in the distilling process to determine which distilled alcohol is retained and which is recycled back to the first still again. Flavour is transferred from the amount of smoke when the grain is dried when the basic beer is made and from various casks used to store the whisky over many years. Yvonne purchased a 12 year old scotch. As we approached Fort William there was the odd patch of snow on the hillsides. Had to telephone the Ben Nevis Guesthouse as we were unable to find it from the information on the internet. Dinner at a restaurant down the road from the Guesthouse.Read more