A Lot To Learn

Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.” With that in mind, we are now in sunny (ok, cloudy and sometimes rainy) Scotland, on the first leg of a trip that will also include the Faroe Islands (a part of Denmark).

We flew into Edinburgh overnight last night and got right to it, driving three hours north to Aviemore and then on to the quaint little village of Nethy Bridge. While in Aviemore, we did a quick shop at the Tesco, the local super market, and it was fun just to see what was on the shelves.

Tesco grocery in Aviemore

Some new brands

Cairngorms in the distance

We didn’t try the coffee machine…but we will go back!

Our cottage in Nethy Bridge is lovely, and it’s just a short walk into town (maybe 15 minutes). There’s not much to Nethy Bridge, just a store and a coffee shop and the Nethy Bridge Hotel, but this is one of the oldest villages in Scotland. It formerly was called Abernethy, but the name was changed in the 1800s to avoid confusion with another Abernethy in Perthshire, 50 miles to the south. The name Nethy is supposedly derived from Nevie or Navie, which is the enclosed space around a Celtic Church.

Our lovely cottage, to the right

“Downtown” Nethy Bridge

Looking at the main intersection

Another view of our cottage

What the town of Nethy Bridge lacks in quantity, it makes up in quality. The Nethy Bridge Hotel structure dates to 1897, but there has been a hotel of some sort on that spot for more than a thousand years. In more recent times, Cary Grant, Mae West, and Lauren Bacall have all stayed here.

Nethy Bridge Hotel

The grounds at the hotel, stunning

Another view of the hotel

The lovely courtyard outside of the hotel’s pub

We started at the pub, where we enjoyed a beer served at room temperature (as is tradition). Scots have been brewing beer for 5,000 years, so we figured we’d try to learn something. Traditional Scottish “real ale” also doesn’t have a ton of carbonation. Beer geeks know this and seek it out, while tourists sometimes send back their drink and complain that it’s flat and warm (thanks to my friend Scott for schooling me on that some years ago).

It’s been a long day without much sleep!

ok, so an IPA and not a Scottish Ale, but served warm so felt authentic

cheers!

What’s a pub without a resident dog?

These are all local, so a good reminder we are far away

Our dinner at the hotel was lovely, and we started with appetizers that included something called “haggis bon-bons” (hey, when in Rome, you eat what the Parisians eat, or something like that). I dove headlong into the haggis, even if it wasn’t fully traditional. I confess I didn’t love the idea of what it was made of, but it tasted really good, a lot going on in a small space. And clearly they put haggis in a small package for tentatively adventurous eaters (read: tourists).

In a tip of the cap to my brother–who as a kid had an hours-long standoff with my mom over eating peas, and finally ate half of a pea–Suzy ate approximately one half of one pea’s worth of haggis. She did, however, enjoy the salmon, and the fish and chips (with peas).

Smoked salmon appetizer

That’s my brother, after the pea-stand-off

Fish and chips, Scottish style

Afterwards she said about the haggis that she “just wasn’t wild about eating something that contained lung.” Perhaps there are foreign lands after all…or perhaps we just have more to learn.