Sailing north on the west coast of Scotland this morning, we anchored first in Loch Ewe and visited the century-old gardens of Inverewe: fifty acres of rare species gathered from all over the world and sustained by the tempering winds of the Gulf Stream: rhododendrons forty feet high, and to the delight of some gardener guests, a blue poppy from the Himalayas.
We moved north and into the longest salt-water loch in Scotland, Loch Broom, to dock at Ullapool, a fishing port nestled among magnificent hills. It was from here that the "Hector", the ship Canadians consider their "Mayflower," sailed in 1773 to Nova Scotia, carrying the ancestors of thousands of Canadians and Americans, among them a fellow guest, Margot MacKay, my step-sister, who found a dozen of her forebears in the "Hector's" manifest.
As we sailed out of the loch in the early evening, to a background of hills so beautiful it took the breath away, I shared a taste of Scotland's best export (after its people)--the whiskey they spell "whisky" and which in Gaelic means "the water of life."
