Don't panic -Siouxsie says it will be alright

 My last full day in work, and the enormity of the task was starting to sink in. I have managed to work out a route through some of Scotland's awesome West Coast, across several islands  before turning  back south along the iconic  A9  through the famous Speyside glen before threading my way past Edinburgh, the lowlands and back to England and home to South Wales. It involves 55 distilleries, 30 tours/tastings and not to mention a small issue of 2,500 miles, riding 20 ferries, and 17 hotels/B&Bs.

So, the last night of preparation could have done without discovering the luggage doesn't fit, and it didn't help having to re-arrange the itinerary because a distillery cancelled on me. The camera case somehow got smaller but is was all a bit tight. Then where do I put the 30 Welsh Cakes and half dozen Toberones and still leave room to purchase some distillery exclusive single malts?

The little item shown opposite is one of Diageo's Rare Malts series of about 50 'expressions' and will cost you at least £500 at auction, and no, I haven't got one.

So I crammed the camera into the top box on the bike, took Siouxsie at her word and prayed it would be OK tomorrow.

Just who is Siouxsie and what is her part in this

     As you might expect, preparations for this immense trip are quite well advanced, routes have been planned, ferries have been paid for, hotels chosen and booked. All in all it was going well. So, then it went wrong. Whilst booking hotels is now a simple task, yes Booking.com seem to think I'm some kind of genius, probably because I've booked 19 rooms in 19 separate accommodations. I wish I could say the same about the distilleries. And to make things worse I decided a dash-cam was a good idea, only I would construct it myself with help from Siouxsie. Then there was the problem of navigation - last time I tried this I got lost several times a day, could I use my phone for sat-nav?

     Photographically I had a digital camera and the knowledge of having done this before at the Isle of Man TT back in 2007 , so I invested in a 110 fitting handlebar clamp, a 110 to 1/4 inch camera mount and a 1/4 inch  tripod 360 degree adaptor. This should give the camera a secure mounting behind the screen but crucially above the faring.

     And it worked after 3 days of fiddling and testing, filming the road, the sky, the mirror, but mostly the sky, I got it shooting correctly. Flushed with success, I turned my attention to the Sat-Nav issue, a trial was conducted at the British Masters Championships in Derby, largely because the car's maps were too far out of date, but I did need to know. Yes at 10:00pm somewhere on the A38 the phone sat-nav got lost on a non-existent section of the A50 and  followed that by going flat in the middle of Derby's one way system after just 2 hours service.

      My solution was to install a USB socket onto the handlebars of the bike to provide constant charging of the phone whilst it resided in my pocket with me listening intently via the earphones. This, Siouxsie informed me, was the perfect solution. Weeeellllll - not quite. The USB socket has a blue LED to indicate it is on, 2 days after installing it, the bike's battery was flat! Note to self: I must remember to switch it off overnight.

    It became apparent that selfies were possible but self-videos were not, so I have enlisted the old fashioned technique of the timer and the tripod seen strapped pole vault style across the back seat - fingers crossed with that one when I found it too big for top box and panniers alike. Siouxsie assures me it'll be perfectly safe.

 

     Now, with the multi-media all sorted, I just have to figure out where to put 50 bottles of single malt whisky, any thoughts Siouxsie?

In the beginning there was single malt whisky

, Way back in the annals of time, well 2002 to be precise, I went on a little journey up around the Highlands of Scotland, visiting both current and extinct distilleries. Basically it was inspired by a book that I read by a chap called Brian Townsend called Scotch Missed. I thought it would be cool to try and retrace his steps and set a few steps of my own, only I didn't drive, I went by motorcycle.

That sounds simple enough, but an aging Ducati is not really the most reliable touring vehicle I've ever ridden. So it was quite an adventure, I got lost several times, I found some interesting distilleries, quite a bit of single malt whisky at the hotels I stayed in. It was a good time, spoilt only by the rain and the flooding.

I really didn't get around to doing it again until now, having got somewhat older, but not so much wiser. I'm still riding motorbikes, the Ducati is more of a decoration now, than actual motorcycle and I wouldn't ride it because it breaks down more times than it works. There is a replacement on the block, appropriately named Suzuki GSX650F called Siouxsie. It's a nice enough bike, always starts, doesn't catch COVID19, it runs and runs and runs, but doesn't handle like a Ducati, it handles more like a car but then I'm past that age really. But it hasn't stopped me enjoying riding so when I watched "The long way round", "The long way down" and The long way up" and whichever other way that messers McEwan and Boorman went that was long. I thought "I could do some of that again", only this time I think I'll just go round Scotland - all that fancy travelling halfway around the world just to write about riding on some really crap roads, falling off and then hurting myself was not for me, no I can do that in the UK for much less. 

So what to do? The planning started and progressed well and it was towards the end of 2019 that it started shaping up into a really decent idea: to visit lots of distilleries, ride lots of really wonderful highland roads, do some island hopping on those marvelous Highland ferries. But life had other plans for me. We all know what happened in 2020 and yes I caught the coronavirus, thankfully not big time, but I wasn't well, and my wife wasn't well with it either. We weren't really off work because we were working from home anyway, so the planning came to nothing.

Time passed and the world started coming back to work, I thought right let's get this tour on the road! So more planning was done and it became obvious that this was not going to be anything like easy, mostly this was because the distilleries couldn't tell whether to say they would have a tour or a tasting, stay closed  or just let me on site to have a poke around. Thanks to COVID19 everything was shutdown with ferries running reduced sailings and half the timetables ripped up and shredded, I couldn't tell if I could even get to some of these Hebridean islands.

Having worked out how I was going to visit 50+ distilleries spread across the Grampians and Cairngorms and half a dozen islands, I was somewhat disappointed when the distilleries started re-opening with completely different ideas from what they had before they shutdown. I had to reschedule and re-route but inevitably some distilleries fell off the itinerary. Being a persistent sort, I eventually got round to booking ferries and even hotels. That's when I hit my first minor disappointment Caledonian MacBrayne (Calmac) ferries wouldn't let me off of Islay, trapped on a  Whisky island - what could I do? Turns out some commercial vehicles were travelling on the same ferry from Port Askaig and were using all the lash points leaving none for me and Siouxsie. So I had to scrap the afternoon visits to Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain and the new comer at Ardnahoe, make do with Lagavulin in the morning and plan to get the ferry from Port Ellen at midday.

The Isle of Arran was the next disaster, two distilleries and one owner. By this time I had booked the relevant hotels and more to the point, the ferry onto Arran and the ferry off of the same island, only to find they would be shut.

 That left me trapped on Arran instead, with Lochranza and Laag distilleries shut on the Sunday when previously they were open, offering tours and I had deliberately arranged to meet up with the distillers on arrival on Arran on that Sunday. At least the ride would be good unless the weather decides otherwise. Then I read that the Calmac ferry to Brodick, the main ferry port on Arran, had broken down again! Would I even get to Arran?

All things being even, I leave for Scotland on Friday 4th September 2021, watch this space, what could go wrong.......