Scotland Or Bust

As those of you who read Dawn’s blog may know, we’re finally going on the Scottish vacation we’ve been talking about for the last few years. Or rather, late next year we’ll be going on our Scottish vacation. Dawn surprised me a couple of weeks ago by coming down to my office and informing me that she’d bought tickets to see Hamlet. I was thrilled, I love Hamlet. Then she informed me that it would be performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon which is freaking amazing. Add in the fact that David Tennant (the current Dr. Who or Barty Crouch Jr for those of you who track your British actors via Harry Potter movies) is playing Hamlet and Patrick Stewart is Claudius and it just keeps getting better. I’m super excited.

Another nice feature of the play is we finally have a date to plan our vacation around, it no longer is this nebulous event that we’d like to do someday. Since we’ll already be in England we might as well hop over to Scotland. Once in Scotland we might as well visit Islay, the home of our favorite scotch distilleries. We both want to visit Iceland so why not tag that island on the way home? If you fly Icelandair to/from Europe you can arrange for a layover for a day or two in Iceland as part of the trip. This far out from the actual trip our plans are pretty ambitious. We’ve roughed out the amount of time we’d want to spend at each destination and the trip will be a bit longer than two weeks. Vacation time isn’t a problem for us, but we’ll have to see how many of the financial and logistical hurdles we can clear.

Trust me, logistical hurdles abound. I’m glad we’re starting to plan a year in advance because this trip is going to be complicated. Since we’re essentially island hopping; getting around isn’t going to be easy. It will probably involve plane, train, bus, and/or ferry in addition to a rent-a-car. I know I don’t like travel by boat so I’ve been pushing to limit the amount of ferry travel. Dawn says that she’s read that the ferry ride from Edinburgh to Islay is two hours long. That sounds like two hours of hell to me. The fact that it’s traditional to eat fish whist on the ferry is of little comfort…but the prospect seems to excite Dawn.

We found out that you can take a puddle jumper plane over to Islay. It’s a bit more expensive and your travel times are more limited…but that’s what I’m opting for. I’m not a big fan of heights and I have a feeling that riding in a puddle jumper may be a terrifying experience, but the trip will be completed in half-an-hour. That’s a 75% reduction in suffering the way I see it. Dawn insists that we take the ferry back though…so it’s really only a 37.5% reduction to suffering over the round trip.

Still, all the boats and puddle jumpers will be worth it to stay a couple of days on Islay. There are eight active (soon to be nine) scotch distilleries on the island and they’re all pretty close together. The islands industry is whisky making followed by tourism for bird watching. It sounds like a beautiful place to drink. Our plan it to stay at little B&B’s and fill our days with distillery tours, pubs, and sightseeing. I get relaxed just thinking about how relaxing it’s going to be.