Day 4-Sat. 20 Feb.
Today was yet another day of travel, although much shorter than Wednesday, since I was only going from Edinburgh to Glasgow. But there also happened to be a rail workers strike today, but luckily the route I was traveling was not affected too much.
After checking out of my hostel, I headed up the Royal Mile to do two of the smaller museums on the Royal Mile. There are almost as many tourist trap shops as small museums. This time I visited the John Knox house, which is part of the Scottish Storytelling Centre and is the house John Knox lived in while preaching at St. Giles Cathedral, just up the road. I then headed across the street to the Museum of Childhood, which contains many, many toys from over mostly the past century. (Note: yesterday’s post said I did this on Friday, I actually did the Museum of Edinburgh then. With so many small museums, they kind of blurred together. I have corrected yesterday’s post).
Then it was time to catch my train to Glasgow. Since my ticket was good for any train, I got there a little early in case of a canceled or delayed train due to the strike. Even though most trains were running a little late, I was able to get an earlier train than I had anticipated. An amazing thing about the Edinburgh-Glasgow train is that they have a food trolley that goes up and down the train. Unfortunately it wasn’t a little old lady that asked you “Anything from the trolley, dears?” That would have been too perfect.
After arriving in Glasgow, I headed straight to the bus station to catch a bus to the Glengoyne Distillery:
The tour began with a tasting of their 10-year old Scotch (£27/$43) and their 12-year old (£40/$64). The 12-year old is bottled at cask strength, meaning no water is used to dilute it to 40% or 43% ABV, it is bottled at 57.2% ABV. We then departed on the tour of the facility, which was not in production the day I was there, so we didn’t get to see anything happening. I won’t go into all the details of how they make their scotch, but here are a few photos of the distillery:
The shape of the stills in the last one are unique to every distillery, so no other distillery has stills of the same shape.
We then ended the tour with a taste of the 17-year old (£50/$77), recently voted the best highland single malt, and the 21-year (£80/$128) old varieties. Of all the varieties we tasted I liked the 10 and 17 year old the best.
Above, Glengoyne's core range (L to R: 10, 17, 21 yr. old). One we did not get to sample was this 40-year old that goes for £3750/$6,000:
An interesting note about the Glengoyne Distillery is that it barely makes it into the highland region, the road running in front of it is the dividing line between the highland and lowland whiskey producing regions.
Upon returning to Glasgow it was time for the first film of the Glasgow Film Festival, Crazy Heart. This was the first U.K. screening outside of London (wide release is next week). The movie was very good, and now I am extremely torn between wanting Jeff Bridges or Morgan Freeman to win the Oscar. The movie tells the story of Bad Blake (Bridges), a down and out country singer on his journey of cleaning up his life. Along the way he meets Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhall), but things don’t work out for them in the end, which helps to serve the point of the movie. He does get his career back though. It is very powerful, and I would highly recommend it to anyone. Jeff Bridges (and Colin Ferrell) do a surprisingly good job doing their own singing. Grade: A-.
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