Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
mothballed neighbour for Diageo to be able to market both if they wanted to and thought
the demand might be there.
The A9 tends to get better the further north it heads. Beyond Brora is some wonderful,
free-feeling road set in extravagantly open, wide-screen scenery; even if you weren't on a
probably doomed quest for some unspeakably supreme whisky, you'd still have the exhil-
arating feeling - twisting along this rising, rushing braid of tarmac - of whirling towards
the end of the world. To the left, north and west, are the hills and lone, distant mountains,
the few forests and many moors. The sea is always there to the right, glittering, studded
in the distance with rigs and production platforms, its ever-changing surface textured and
grained with the competing influences of tide and wind, fraying to surf at the stony mar-
gins of the winding hem of coast. The single-line rail route from Inverness to Thurso and
Wick twines beside the road as far as Helmsdale, usually between the road and the coast,
often coming close enough for trains to shield passing cars from spray when the weath-
er's foul and the waves break mountainously on the rocks and shingle beyond.
Entirely the worst weather for this journey, however, is when the fog rolls in. You
have to go slow, you can hardly overtake, and worst of all there's not even any scenery to
look at to compensate. So far over the years we've been very lucky, never encountering
more than patchy mist, and today it's just fabulous; bright bright bright with a few
scattered fluffy clouds. The M5 eats miles on a road like this; even staying at licence-
friendly speeds there's an easy rhythm to the road the car slots into like a Scalextric racer,
barely slowing from such modest speeds for bends, and dispatching the occasional in-
stances of slower traffic with ease. Part of the fun of a truly good drive in a fast car on
real-life roads is not going too fast; the faster you go the more relatively slower stuff you
have to overtake, and at a certain ellative point overtaking can stop being fun and just be-
come a chore.
The driver's own abilities being taken as some sort of constant, the sweet spot on a
non-trivial drive is finding the right speed for the mixture of variables involved: legality
and safety, the abilities of the car, the physicalities of the road, the weather and light, and
the balance of similarly directioned and oncoming traffic. The drive to Wick feels like a
good 'un and my passenger seems happy, which is generally the single most important
and telling thing to get right when you're not driving alone.
We stop at the Pentland Arms Hotel in Lybster. Another definite find. Lunch at Jo's
Kitchen there more than makes up for any breakfast deficit; I go for a baked potato and
salad with the firm intention of leaving plenty of room for whatever might be on the Bun-
chrew's menu tonight but the spud that arrives is the size of a rugby ball and surrounded
by half a field's worth of salad; I immediately resolve not to eat it all but it tastes far too
good and besides, I wouldn't want to upset the chef. I get lost trying to find the Gents and
wander past some very nice-looking bedrooms on the first floor, gleaming in the sunlight
