United Kingdom (London and Edinburgh)

[hangchoi]

We started our out-of-town trip heading north of Edinburgh for the following 3 days. The first day of the three was sightseeing.......

On north-east side of Edinburgh is where the home of golf situated. St. Andrews - a dream place for golfers and we had to go and take a look, eventhough we cannot have a swing there. Unfortunately, it rained heavily that morning and the fairway was turned into a pond.....but the signature bridge was still looking good.

The first one shows the first tee and 18th green at the far end as I was standing on 18th fairway. The second one is the bridge and the third one had the signature ROAD HOLE at the far end. You see the flood on the fairway.......  

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After the visit of the home of golf, we took a short visit to St Andrews University. How come our trip has so many Prince William and Kat related spots, this was the place where they studied. Then we headed to Glamis Castle. A castle of 600 years old at least and it was said that it had a haunted chamber where you can still hear the voice of card playing by the previous owner of the castle in Saturday's night...... 

The first is the St. Andrews University, then the castle, the guard towers and the surrounding....

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Castle, castle, castle.....Castle visiting is a must do event for visiting highland Scotland. Our next castle was Dunnottar, an even older castle where some of its buildings were established in 5th century. The view there was stunning and beautiful, close to coast on a rather isolated island.....

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The place we stayed was also a castle too  

We stayed in the Kildrummy castle hotel, a small hotel with not many rooms and we took 4. Each room has different colour tones and interior furnishes. The hotel is beautiful, quiet and we all suspect that it may have something "fun" at night. One of my friends had her bed-side alarm on at 0:00....

These photos show the hotel and its garden. The third and the forth ones are the interior (3rd is the entrance corridor, 4th is the drawing room)

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Don't think that the rooms for customers were in old style and classic. They are quite modern, except the key (1st).....

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More hotel pictures.....

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The next two days were our whisky tour.....We visited 5 different distilleries / whisky company in total. I will write something about each of them later.

The first one we went to was Benromach. This is the smallest distillery in Speyside area. It had a close-down period of about 10 years and was re-open in 1998 by Prince Charles. You can see the cask signed by Prince Charles too.

The distillery is intact and tidy, very artisan. They also have a little museum showing the old equipment for making whisky (the rest of the pictures)

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Second spot is a whisky merchant. We had a tasting there and after the tasting, we went to their shop at Elgin which has about 200 years of history. What are we doing there?? Shopping of course......

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The next one is Macallan, a world famous brand.

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If you look at the logo of Macallan, you will see a small classic Victorian building (1st). Its name is East Elchis House. This is the real stuff (2nd)