Sunday morning had us up bright and early, with a quick stop at the local Costa for my required caffeine fix. Tea drinker Jeff fits right in with the tea loving Scots- tea in the morning, coffee after lunch for them.
Scotland is a land that relishes eccentricity, it seems to me, and pays enduring respect to it’s colorful history. St. Andrews is a town in Fife, properly called the Kingdom of Fife.
It’s not like every county or district in the country has a special, Royal name, just Fife. I couldn’t find a similar appellation for any other region in Scotland. I guess folks like the sound of it- it raises 
visions of medieval jousts and castles in their hey day. Yet the Kingdom of Fife’s origins go back a bit further in time than Ivanhoe and his sort, with the earliest written accounts dating to the Romans.
Fife is an Anglicization of the Pict word Fib. PICT derives from Picti, meaning “painted people” in Latin.
The Picts were an ancient Celtic collection of tribes who were fond of painting their bodies in preparation for battle. A blue tint came from the mud waddle used for the paint job. And the Picts painted everything: this war paint was all the adornment worn by Picts when they went out to war.
By the way, the Romans never conquered the people of Scotland. Maybe they preferred not to fight naked barbarians?
We had the choice of routes to take us to Aberlour, either up the coast road to Aberdeen then a left turn, or the slower drive up the central path of the Cairngorms National Park. We’ve traveled through the Cairngorms before so we wouldn’t pass up a trip through their eerie majesty if time allowed.
Mountains, or Ben’s in Scot’s lingo, don’t rise much more than 4000 feet above sea level in Scotland but the Cairngorms are chock full of these summits. Lower slopes are covered in grasses, shrubs and short, wind twisted trees but the higher reaches are stark gray, barren sentinels.
The Mountain Zone is actually an Arctic Wilderness, one of the largest on earth.
It’s an otherworldly landscape that offers a dramatic counter point to the Spey River Valley where we would spend the next three days.
Aberlour is a sleepy village that a river runs through. The Spey brings anglers for the trout while The Whiskey Trail, which also passes through town, brings blokes like us. And many great links courses are nearby just north on the Moray Firth.
The High Street offers a CO-OP food/whiskey store, a great little coffee shop/gift store, a well stocked whisky store, a butcher’s shop, a Kirk and market cross. Just a half mile north of the town center sits the famous Walkers Shortbread factory.
The Pagoda, a tidy little vacation home is right in the middle of this rural bliss. It sports 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, a comfortable sitting room and a large dine-in kitchen with a clothes washer but not a dryer.
Two baths are highly desirable when traveling with Jeff – he takes quite a while with his daily ablutions.
A jewel of the town is the Mash Tun, a lively whisky bar (800+ bottles) and a fine restaurant. We dined there three nights running last year.
We might do the same this year.
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