Oh, hello! Is it another day already? We thought we were on Islay time? Normally, we would have said it slows down a bit, but it seems to have caught up with mainland time over the years. Shame!

Anyway, While we want to explore the Island and not only go on another distillery hopping spree, we can’t help ourselves and let our little car drive us to Caol Ila. Turns out the very much updated visitor centre has a new visitor parking lot – or any, for that matter, and a cafe on site, so instead of only browsing the shop, hoping for a proper distillery exclusive bottling. The current offers did not match our pallets much, so we skipped the available liquid and tried the cafe while we were there. We opened one of the sliding windows / doors (“windoors”?) in the tea room and found the freshness to be a little too nippy, so we took some pictures through the glass instead. On warmer days, opening these windoors would have been a grand idea, to have an excellent unobstructed view on Jura’s paps. 

Us being us, while fulfilling the bill for the tea and the two whisky-related books that stuck to our hands on the way to the till, we ad-hocly decided to go on a classic tour. Except for the historic overview of the distillery and Johnny Walker / Diageo at the start of the tour – which reminded us a bit of the Johnnie Walker Experience in Edinburgh, the tour of the distillery itself has not changed much over the past couple of years. With the same number of stills, washbacks and alcohol-yields per annum, there was nothing much new to see, except that during the tour we were allowed to take pictures everywhere. Thank you Diageo, for understanding our inner whisky-geek’s desperate need for this. 

The tour was lengthy enough to have made us a little hungry, so although the cafe does not serve lunch in the sense of the word, they do have a platter service with a decent choice of – let’s call them tapas for the lack of better a word, and a mean soup of the day. Now it is really time to call it and move on.

When on Islay, WhiskySpeller always stops for a new flat-cap. The best place we know for this is the Islay Woollen Mill. The weather has completely turned in our favour by now, giving us some nice opportunities to snap some shots for our social channels of the picturesque mill’s exteriors. Inside, they have some new designs in stock, one of them large enough to fit Thomas’ giant coconut. Mission accomplished.

Back in Bowmore village, we decided to turn yesterday’s soup into pasta sauce and stopped at the Bowmore Refillery for some pasta, and since the Refillery is also the local post office, some stamps to go on our postcards. Good to see a convenience store like this, allowing you to buy per portion ingredients in smaller amounts and a brown paper bag. 

Walking out opposite the shop, located opposite the Peatzeria, we tried to see if they had the Sicilian Rhubarb and Lemon tart available that we had missed out on last weekend. Turns out they serve the tart warm, with warm custard and raspberry sauce, so we headed back to the mashman’s cottage 50 metres up the street and started the evening with dessert. With our paws up watching yet another episode of Doctor Who from the couch, we would eat the pasta and the soup-sauce later in the evening. You’d almost forget we are on our holiday, so no shame there.