Bags packed and ready to go, Thursday night I meet Carmen at Gatwick airport and we caught an Easyjet flight up to Edinburgh. We were lucky enough to catch up with Chris Singleton who picked us up from the airport and put us up for the night. Chris is a mate of ours from Uni.

We were going on a MacBackPackers, 3 Day ‘Highland Romp’ tour of Scotland. It is a pretty good trip, normally it is a jump-off jump-in tour, with a bus leaving every day, so you can stop anywhere for as long as you want and jump on the next bus. Although it sounds like a lot of driving to get around Scotland in a couple of days its not that bad, for example Edinburgh to Inverness is only a 3 ½ hour drive, so if you spread that out over a long day with lots of sightseeing and stops on the way, you only ever drive for 30 minutes at a time.

The bus left Edinburgh at about 9am so we had a couple of hours in the morning to walk around looking at the City. The morning was very ‘crisp’ to say the least as it is getting near winter over here, but the city is still very beautiful. A lot of space, nice stone work and clean. So off north we headed…Our tour guide was Doug, he was a local Scotsman from Edinburgh. His story telling abilities were fantastic and he was constantly spinning a tale of the Scottish history as we drove from place to place.

One of our first stops was at Edradour Distillery, the smallest whisky distillery in Scotland. They make about 15 barrels a week, which although doesn’t sound like very much on its own, when you think that’s 15 barrels a week, 780 barrels a year and the age the whiskey for at least 10 years, they need storage for 7,800 barrels. Then you think of the much larger distilleries which make 10, 100 times that amount. We had our free sample of casket strength whiskey, good stuff for stripping paint I hear, and than our tour of the facilities. It is defiantly small scale stuff, only three staff and the whole process would almost fit in your garage (well a New Zealand garage).

The were about 7 of us on the bus, so more than a double seat each. Jumping back on, we found our nice tour guide had bought us a big bottle of whiskey. Our challenge was to drink it before getting to Loch Ness a few hours later. We found out why later…