I am never one to pass up an opportunity to travel, least of all to Scotland, which is one of my favourites places in the world. So when the inaugural My Peak Challenge event was announced, celebrating Peakers from around the world, to be held in Glasgow, I was quick to grab a ticket. One of my Peak challenges for the year was to climb a Munro, a Scottish classification of a mountain over 3000 feet, so this was the perfect opportunity to tackle that challenge.

My lovely collaborator and hotel roommate Susanne Brouwer had suggested going on one of the conference-suggested day tours, and I was happy for the chance to get out of the city for a day. Organized by Rabbie’s, it was a small, 16-person tour (including several friends from the conference) that took us to Culzean Castle and along the Ayrshire Coast.

On our travels, we always have focused on just taking photos--peering and squinting and desperately trying to capture beautiful, singular moments in time. This last trip, however, saw us branching out of our comfort zone and trying our hand at video. David had a lot of fun playing with the focus and composition, and I had an equally fun time editing things together.  

I was a bit sad to not be able to lounge in our luxurious digs for longer, but we awoke and finished packing up and consolidating our things, as we’d be dropping off the car today. We headed down to the breakfast room for a lovely breakfast, with a friendly, older couple chatting us up about our travel plans. Despite the abundance of castles in Scotland, we hadn’t yet actually gone into any–I think in large part because hasn’t really been that kind of trip. We wanted to cover a fair bit of ground and see the countryside more so than castles, but we felt like it’d be nice to see at least one castle.

Today would be a day of whisky, and we were up bright and early in preparation for it. Our first stop would be one of the smallest Speyside distilleries, Benromach. I had booked David for an “Essential” tour, which involved a distillery tour and a tasting of 4 drams of their different whiskies. We set off from out rural retreat in Inverarnie towards Forres. The tour was set to start at 11 am, and due to traffic (a novel occurrence for us!), we managed to just squeak in on time. I joined as well, taking the basic “Welcome” tour, which was only 6 GBP and included a dram of whisky.

We slept so well that we almost overslept, waking up just 5 minutes before we’d scheduled to have breakfast. We hurriedly made ourselves presentable and stumbled out to the kitchen/dining area. Our host had prepared a lovely breakfast for us according to our requests—David was feeling meat-heavy, opting for black pudding, bacon and haggis, while I went with a poached egg, mushrooms, sausages and a potato scone. It was all super delicious, and we were glad to get a hearty meal in us before our driving day.

The scenery was verdant and lush–beautiful rolling hills dotted by farms and the ubiquitous sheep. We thought it might be a good idea for me to get a bit of practice driving in case I needed to later now (such as on the day of the distillery tours). Honestly, I wasn’t so much disturbed by being on the wrong side of the road so much as by not knowing where the left side of the car was, which made driving on narrow roads an interesting challenge.

Not that our time in Edinburgh hadn’t been a blast, but David and I were both excited to get in a car and get exploring. As it was a Sunday, the earliest we could get our rental was 10 am, which ultimately was fine for us as it gave me a chance to finish packing things up and D an opportunity to walk over to the rental office. With our Toyota Auris in hand, we bid goodbye to our hosts and tackled our first challenge: getting out of Edinburgh. While I had Google directions ready to go, we somehow (repeatedly) missed the street it wanted us to turn onto, so we ended up just pointing the car in a westwardly direction and hoping for the best.

It was a bit of lazy morning, as I stayed at the apartment for most of the morning packing and getting our affairs in order. David attended the second session of talks at the conference, and I came up not long after that for the poster session. I did manage to find a few interesting posters, though not directly related to my current work, and chatted with some friendly presenters before finding a quiet corner to wait for the other NU folk to finish. The two faculty from NU (my advisor and David’s advisor) had arranged to take us all out for a celebratory drink nearby.

Mercifully, we both got a decent night’s sleep at long last. I was up relatively early, as I had conference on the brain. The first sessions of talks at the conference were not very relevant for me, so I opted to stay at the apartment and prepare for my poster presentation.

We were again somewhat slow getting started, as David was still not getting a good night’s sleep. Our plan for the day was to grab a bit of lunch in New Town and then check out Edinburgh Castle before heading over to the conference. We took a meandering walk through the Meadows and chanced to pass Machina Espresso, a delightful little coffee shop where David was eager to get his jolt of high-quality espresso (which was lovely).