We woke up to a miserable day - grey and cool with a forecast of a lot of rain. We decided not to go to the islands. But we did go to the tour operator to find out our options. It was a good thing we hadn’t set our sights on going as all the tors were cancelled due to the weather. The lady suggested we come back tomorrow morning after seeing what the weather was like in the morning so we decided to do that instead of booking it then and there.
We walked along the Main Street and then decided to do a distillery tour of Oban Distillery. A little scotch in the morning would get us through the crummy weather.
Founded in 1794, the distillery is the heart of the town. In fact, there wouldn’t have been an Oban town if it weren’t for entrepreneurial brothers Hugh and John Stevenson. The town grew around the distillery operation. In 1880, the railway arrived in Oban, bringing more commerce and tourism to a town which had largely grown up around the distillery. Today, Oban Distillery is the oldest and smallest distillery in Scotland. The tour was very good but the disappointment came when we only got 1 small taste of the 14 year old scotch that is available in Canada. That’s not entirely true as we did get a thimble of a 9 year old scotch which she took from a cask and was over 58% alcohol by volume. At all the other tours at other distilleries we were told we couldn’t take pictures for health and safety reasons. However, at this one there were no such conditions. That makes me think that the no picture taking at the other places was all bs.

We had lunch at a local pub that was recommended and made our way up steep stairs (many of them), which the locals call Jacobs ladder to a structure that looks like the Colloseum. This is called McCaig’s Tower and is on the cliff above the distillery. This was a make work project undertaken by an Oban tycoon
In 1900. But he died before it was completed and is now just a tourist attraction. We walked up for about 10 minutes through a very nice residential neighbourhood until we arrived at the tower. It’s basically a round structure with arches and no roof that overlooks the bay. The views were spectacular. At the height of the Cold War, in 1956, the worlds first two-way transatlantic telephone cable was laid from this bay (Gallanach Bay) to Newfoundland.

It started raining when we were climbing up so we didn’t spend a lot of time here. We made our way back down to the town. There is a Castle at the end of the esplanade that we decided to hike to but the rain started to batter us and we took shelter in a pub. I started feeling a little off so we decided to go to our room to dry off and recharge before dinner. Once there I started feeling achy and had a stomach issue. I rested for a bit and then we went to dinner. I watched Vic eat (couldn’t fathom putting anything in my mouth) and we returned to the room and I laid down.

I don’t think I’ll be going on a ferry to get to the islands tomorrow unless I start to feel better.

Distillery tour
McCaigs Tower