Some Fun and the Rest is Rest - Aug 12, 2019

Linda and a coo. Yesterday was almost too much as it rained all day and we were either walking in the rain standing in the rain or sitting in a performance nearly all day long. That's why we decided today would be a day of rest, except for our one preplanned adventure which is right around the corner from this sweet coo. It's also why all the posts have gone up in the past few hours, rest for Linda means rest, rest for me means writing.

Just to prove the entire coo is painted. Bad Bob.

I mentioned before that everywhere you go there are these posters touting one show or another.

This is a large cylinder with the posters on them. Interestingly enough the cylinder is metal and the poster is magnetized so they simply place it on the cylinder, align it and it is fastened in place.

Linda resting before our big event of the day. Or to be correct are only event of the day, but she is really looking forward to it.

It is her Edinburgh Gin Distillery tour and tasting. She scheduled it one of the first things after we decided on spending extra time in Edinburgh.

It began with a talk about the history of gin. We learned that gin was first distilled in The Netherlands. What really makes that interesting is that Linda's favorite gin is New Amsterdam that is imported to the states from, you guessed it, The Netherlands.

The process, stills and condensers. They buy pure grain ethanol, diluted 50% with water, add the botanicals for that blend, then distill it. They have three stills, to here and one at another location. At this location they make all of their special blends.

Then it was off to the tasting. When we first sat down we thought we were going to taste five small samples of gin. The glass with ice and orange we thought was water to rinse her mouth out between tastings. How wrong we were and how happy Linda was when we learned that the large glass was a regular gin and tonic. They know how to do it gin tasting right!

You could either sample the gins straight, or if you wanted you could add some tonic. I got a kick out of the fine print on this label. The people from Scotland at our table all laughed and said you need to look around when the sun comes out because all the locals will have wide brimmed hats, long sleeves, sunblock and huge eyeglasses. Fashion for them is different styles and colors of raincoats.

There were four more of us at the tasting that this photo shows all seated around a small table. That's our guide and black at the end.

You can see our into the table did pretty good but it came to emptying the glasses.

It was an awesome setting to have a tasting there in the old bunker.

If you wonder how popular these tastings are, the sign tells you. And they run multiple tours every day.

This one's for our youngest daughter, it gave us a smile and chuckle.