Day 10, continued – Fuck this wind, I want trees

I had planned to spend the evening in the western Orkney city of Stromness, and get to know that a bit. Arriving at town, though, I found I just wanted to get on the ferry to Thurso, on the Scottish mainland. Seriously fuck this wind. And I decided I wanted to book it to southwestern Scotland to see if I could catch some Highland games in a few days.

So let’s journey across the sea and start my evening in Thurso:

Day 11: The Day of the Wolf

As long I was around, I might as well stop in at Wolf Burn right? It bears, after all, the most badass name of a Scotch distillery. Wolf Burn is a young distillery, only about 7 years old or so when I visited, and it was built from the beginning with commercial interests in mind. It’s name and mascot were chosen with marketing in mind, and the owners deliberately chose a distilling process that would allow them to put whisky on the market within a few years.

Still, its manufactured image and product are not without badassery. It takes name of an old distillery on that same location, named after the burn (Scots for “stream”) that flows through the area. Its’ direwolf-looking mascot is based on an old, and now proprietary, sketch from the mainland. And its whisky was surprisingly tasty for one so young. (Though I later had better whisky that was only three years old, from Isle of Raasay distillery.) I went for the premium tasting on this one; it was just me, with some of their finest product, and a friendly staff member to explain them to me.

I next traveled by rail, with a final destination of Blair Atholl, well south in the Scottish mainland, where I planned to resume biking. The ongoing rail strike made trains a bit few and far between, so I had to / got to overnight in Inverness. On the train to Inverness, the ticket collector asked me I might have left my bike helmet in Thurso station. Of course, I had. He appeared genuinely concerned for me, and was clearly working on a solution. He told me to come back to the Inverness station later that evening and they would bring it to me on the next train. I showed up dutifully, and they did! The friendly conductor had my helm in hand, with a note, “For Mr. Milligan in Inverness.” Service with a smile.

Inverness, for many the gateway to the roads less traveled in Scotland (but for me the exit from them), was a lively town, full of music. I stayed at a hostel there, not wanting to spend a large percentage of my short layover finding a campsite and dealing with my tent. I stayed at Bazbackerz, which was cheap, very clean, and very friendly. They hand did my laundry for free, and all of the dorm beds had their own device charging station.

Day 12: Hello trees, my old friend

quick as I had come, I was gone, onto Blair Atholl, a train station not really in the middle of nowhere but sort of on the edge of nowhere, to begin my bike ride again.