Islay drink to that.

It's beautiful here. Co-workers be warned, if they had any need for mechanical engineers here, I'd already have applied for positions, even at severely reduced pay.

Our flight last night was delayed, so we got in a little later than anticipated. It's light until after 8PM so there was still a few hours of light to get used to driving. The roads are narrow and winding and some are actually one lane and not just really narrow two lanes that we think should be one lane. In other words, like Ireland, but without massive stone walls to keep you on them. After stopping in at the B&B (which is one of the largest rooms I've stayed in at one, almost twice the space of the Salamander House), we went out for dinner at the White Hart Hotel where I had a venison pie and a glass of Port Ellen that constituted half of our bill. If you're up on Islay Scotch, you already know that Port Ellen is no longer an active distillery, so getting to taste it is quite a treat! If you're curious about the expense, I suggest you search for a bottle on E-bay.

This morning, with the help of a pamphlet with all the distillery tour times on it, I made a schedule of events for our week and annotated items we'd already made arrangements for so that the B&B could set up the rest of our distillery tours. Don, the English proprietor, looked at it and told me I spend too much time using a computer. It does look rather a lot like an outlook calendar. We're going to tour Ardbeg today after lunch. We're trying to get to the 7 active distilleries that we've tasted. There's a new one, and theres Jura a ferry ride away, but I couldn't fit anything else in. We'll just have to come back another time!

We were going to do some beach walking around Ardbeg, but since the tour doesn't start until 3, we decided to go on a longer stroll on Mull of Oa to see the American Monument, a monument dedicated to the American soldiers who had died off the coast on two separate occasions in 1918. Bill will post photos. The walk is a 2 mile circle. We took the cliff facing side on the way out, which worked well as the wind started to pick up as we made our way back through the fields. I can't describe and I'm not sure pictures can do justice to just how impressive and beautiful this island is.