Cairngorms

Our next stop in Scotland was the large national park called the Cairngorms that stretches across a broad swath of the eastern and southern highlands. The Cairngorms have stunning hills, mountains, forests, and lochs. The park is dotted with adorable Scottish towns like Dunkeld and Braemar and crisscrossed with windy roads that meander through the glens, over the hills, and between the mountains. 

Roads in the UK

Speaking of windy roads. I've commented on Britain's questionable highway engineering and planning before (see here). Seeing as the situation hasn't improved materially since our last visit to the UK, I feel obligated to comment on it again, albeit with some new thoughts. 

The roads in the UK are terrible. In particular, the roads in these remote parts of the country are incredibly narrow and not always well maintained: They are riddled with potholes, a key concern for Hannah who was convinced that they would puncture our tires. Hannah kept our drives through the highlands interesting by punctuating our conversations with sudden gasps, followed by urgent calls for evasive action, followed by stern admonitions. I avoided some of these obstacles, but rolled over far too many for Hannah's comfort. The challenge was that the combination of narrow roads and potholes often forced me to choose between careening off the road into a ditch or rolling over the pothole, and I generally chose the latter. Hannah, ever the perfectionist, was not sympathetic to my conundrum.

You may be thinking at this point that the UK's roadways are probably quite dangerous and I would agree and add that it is perhaps more lethal for our avian friends. We saw a large number of dead birds on the roads in Scotland who had presumably been struck by cars. :(

Dunkeld

We stayed in Dunkeld, which is just outside the southern border of the Cairngorms. Specifically, we stayed at the Taybank hotel, which was formerly a temperance hotel and now operates a lively bar on the ground floor and a beer garden along the bank of the river Tay. On our last evening, a local folk band with about a dozen musicians showed up with fiddles, guitars, accordions and a piano player and played for several hours in the bar. They took about half the floor space, but had the place hopping!

Dunkeld is a lovely town, with quaint shops including the artisan bakery Aran, which is run by a finalist from Hannah's much beloved Great British Bake Off, and Redwood Wines, a restaurant and wine bar run by Morgwn Preston-Jones and his wife Roseanna. Morgwn, coincidentally, is from Oakland, CA and his extended family runs Groth and Silver Oak in Napa Valley.

Castles and the Like

We visited several castles or manors or palaces or otherwise impressive buildings during our tour of the Cairngorms. 

Balmoral is the Scottish estate of the British royal family and is suitably spectacular. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were big fans of Scotland and they took over the estate and made it into a proper royal residence by making the castle more grandiose and embellishing the gardens and grounds with invasive species (e.g., coastal redwood).

Blair Castle was the long-time residence of the ancient Scottish family, the Murrays. It is the ancestral home of Clan Murray and the seat of their chief, the Duke of Atholl (though the current Duke lives in South Africa). Blair Castle is unusual relative to other castles we saw: It was painted white (instead of unpainted stone) and it's a very asymmetric and amorphous structure.

We had dinner at the Fife Arms Hotel, which has an affiliation with a gallery group, Hauser and Wirth (Hannah and I visited the Hauser and Wirth gallery and gardens in Somerset last year). The Fife Arms puts a whimsical twist on what I (a person lacking expertise) would describe as the Victorian style. With over 1,600 piece of art--everything from a modern neon glass chandelier to more traditional masterworks--the place is a maximalist playground.  Each room has a different theme, complete with its own decorative elements, wallpaper, etc. We were given a brief tour by a bubbly Scottish hotel staffer who showed us the astronomy room and the stunning Queen Victoria room. Before dinner, we wandered through the gardens, and then had cocktails in a drawing room with plush leather couches, oriental rugs, and a Picasso on the wall. Our dinner was in a large dinning room whose centerpiece was a massive taxidermized royal stag (royal because it had 12 points on its horns).